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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