Black Wolf: Layout Sketches and Resurrection

Sometimes I wonder how the pictures alone would work as a story.

Of course, pages 4-5 give away the aesthetic ending. These are the wordless layout sketches for Black Wolf of the Glacier, which will shortly be printed on watercolor paper and painted in an aqueous wash. The first page will most likely compose the cover art. I have tried to maintain consistent appearance of the characters throughout the story. The girl and her dog now have names compliments of Deb Vanasse: Shawna and Buddy, respectively.

Black Wolf is a story of the rich life, death, and incomplete resurrection of a wolf in the form of an audio tape of Romeo howling, perched on a rock near the edge of Mendenhall Glacier. When the watercolors arrive, I might convey the howling sound somehow using emitting shapes in all the negative space surrounding the moon. Or perhaps I'll just leave it negative; maybe that's what a howl sounds like, anyway: an empty sky.

Drawing about rebirth in the spring almost feels too appropriate.

In my last entry, I mentioned the loss of my older Wacom drawing tablet, an Intuos3 with an abused power cord connection. Uncannily, that too is now back from the dead, and in better form than before due to some brilliant repairwork on the part of Tucker Kopf at Hatch Early Learning's technical support department, who also styles himself "Norse God of Technology." Where previously I had no drawing tablets, now I have two, and I don't know how to cope with the luxury of it, or how to evaluate which to use. One is compact, wireless, and prettily programmable. The other is generously sized and familiar. Sometimes switching tablets refreshes my lines, like a new shampoo. But it is lovely to see my old tablet rekindled when I had been so reconciled to its fate, leaning against the wall on the floor in a cold, empty hallway. Now its little blue LED is alive again and shining. Romeo and my Wacom live on in different forms of glory.

In other good news, Lucy's Dance was listed as required reading for the Alaskan Battle of the Books.

Children of Alaska, I wish you a merry warfare.

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LD3: Neutral Coloration

My third illustration for Lucy's Dance treats the delicate topic of the missionaries who visited Stebbins in the late 1920's and stopped the Curukaq festival . . . or rather, tamed it into hiatus. A Jesuit missionary, Fr. Martin Lonneaux, overlooking the support-system of the Yup'ik community, perceived that the gift-giving portion of the festival was costly enough that it left several Yup'ik families destitute. Lonneaux concocted a watered-down version of the potlatch that would involve smaller, church-supplied gifts, but in the process amputated the festive spirit of the festival such that his "pretend kassiyuq " never caught on. For further details, see Stebbins Dance Festival (xxiv). The wording in Lucy's Dance focuses neutrally on the cultural misunderstanding. It would have been easy to use powerfully-charged language when summarizing this cultural loss. From what little I can find about him, Fr. Lonneaux, SJ seems to have been a relatively toler...

Work from Home

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Ad Hominem and the Carney Lexicon

Ad hominem is one of the better-known fallacies, perhaps because it is so common. In Latin, it means: "to the man." In American, it translates fuzzily to: "Oh yeah? Well, you're ugly." Broken down, the ad hominem argument looks like this: Person 1 makes claim X There is something objectionable about Person 1 (maybe ugliness) Therefore claim X is false Ad hominem is one of the many red-herring arguments, fallacious when it diverts attention from the core argument to focus on some flaw about the arguer. In creating my illustration, I needed a distracting character, and what character is more distracting than one of those bellowing circus-game people with the rings, bottles, and inflatable dolphin prizes? I quickly realized my vocabulary lacked a word for a purveyor of state-fair gamery, other than the generic "carney." Perhaps this is because I have never played a circus game, due to my lack of coordination and my dominant interest in spending my tick...

Design & Execution

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