Design & Execution

Before I return to the snail fallacies, let me show a line drawing of the Red Queen from  Alice in Wonderland  for a quilt design. Cuddly, no?  I didn't ape any one popular rendering of the queen, though costumes are influenced by engravings of Queen Elizabeth I. Of course, I ran a background check on the Red Queen before starting. Behold: two red queens populate Lewis Carrol's/Charles Dodgson's literature. The Queen of Hearts of  Alice in Wonderland  is more obviously ill-tempered, given as she is to bellowing "off with their heads" and cheating at croquet. Of course, she's a dominant playing card, and an allegory to Queen Victoria of England. The Red queen in  Through the Looking Glass  is a chess piece who presents an exaggerated evolutionary hypothesis: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place," or that it takes a constant effort and adaptation to maintain a competitive position. Similarly, "Red Queen" marketi...

LD17 is my final full internal illustration for Lucy's Dance . I have only the epilogue insets and the cover to go, and of course a mystery bag of revisions to arrive from the cultural expert. But back to the illustration. The view echoes that of the opening illustration but is more contemporary, showing small, rectangular structures rather than the qasgiq huts. One of my favorite moments in illustrating Lucy's Dance has been when one student in Stebbins claimed he could point out the location his home on my drawing. Every structure shown here is based on a real one, or at least a structure that stood when my model photograph was taken, so I hope that similar moments arise for others. LD17's landscape is deeper into springtime than LD1, I assume because it took the village dwellers a bit longer that year to rekindle the tradition. Actually, I thought that a more colorful landscape would better suit the hopeful denouement. The whitecaps on Norton Sound are less rigid. The ...

LD16 shows Apa dancing with Lucy's makeshift version of the Yup'ik dance stick. I use the spine to bisect the image into a left page showing the present Curukaq festival in a gymnasium, and the right showing a past Curukaq occuring in a qasgiq hut in Apa's memory. The temporal comingling seemed appropriate in light of the Yup'ik cyclical conception of time, which would fold together past and present springtime festivals. I have drawn Apa's face slightly to the side of the spine to avoid interruption by the spine. You may notice that I have also shifted the dance stick to a lower position to prevent visual entanglement with the background. I encountered one problem: Apa faces away from the people behind him, partly so that he occupies the foreground (I'm hoping that readers assume that people surround him). Unfortunately, no matter how I drew him with his eyes open, he seemed to retain a look in his eyes that could be described ...

Although the comparison is not made explicitly in the story of Lucy's Dance , Lucy's gift to her Apa is a primitive dance stick, arguably the most important prop in the Curukaq dance festival. These words from the Stebbins Dance Festival book recall the role of the dance stick: "Holding the dance wands, the directors recalled remarkable encounters between humans and animals." "Each of the three (dance) directors held an eniraraun (dance baton, pointer), also referred to as apallircuun (literally, 'device for providing the verse'), a two-to thee-foot-long wooden wand that the directors moved in time to the drumbeat. Each pointer was decorated with feathers topped with down or rabbit fur that accentuated its movement. Carvers also sometimes appended small, wooden figurines. In some villages the wands held by the two outside directors had crosspieces. The straight central wand, trimmed with a wolf or fox tail, referred to the well-known story of a man wh...

In this rendition of the gifting montage for Lucy's Dance , I have added a bumper to my dogsled. Mushing advisors have sternly admonished me that a dogsled is naked without a rounded bumper of some kind. Though my Yup'ik source photo of a dogsled lacked a bumper, my sources assured me that the photo was probably an exception caused by lack of timely repair after one of the photographed musher's dogs attempted to follow a squirrel up a birch tree. How easy it is to forget that labeled, archived, black-and-white photos may contain factual idiosyncrasies. And how difficult to tell when they do. Also: I have included an image of a gift, Lucy's gift in specific, floating above the Curukaq festivities. Does the gift confuse anyone with its location or its loose relation to the text? With those two points, I'm off to the park to watch dogs find and eat colored eggs that were hidden a little too cleverly. Enjoy your extended weekend, Easter, fertility festival, or March Ma...

In my tenth illustration for Lucy's Dance , the Curukaq dance festival is afoot in the gymnasium of an unnamed, Yup'ik village. Traditional foods--dried salmon, fry bread, and akutaq --appear on the table. The text emphasizes that the participants lack many traditional dancing artifacts and skills, so they improvise by dancing in their own ways. The row of drummers and the food constitute the central elements of heritage, unless you count the general spirit of revelry. In past illustrations, I have colored most of the characters' hair (almost solid black in reality) with purple. By request, I tried a more realistic dark brown in LD10. The result: I find it difficult to see any texture in the hair with such a dark color. In the thumbnail-sized image, texture may be indiscernible. Showing texture requires a lighter color, but would be inappropriate to show the hair as a lighter brown, which would convey a skewed image of the ethnicity. I'm still a fan of purple, but it...

This week, Lucy faces that childhood dilemma of wanting to give generously while facing a budget that includes household flotsam that nobody wants. It's tough to inspire appreciation for a gift that no one misses when it disappears; like the dance festival, the gift must be infused with a new value. After foraging around the house, Lucy finds that several familiar outdoor elements have found their way indoors. Her resulting bounty: a tip of moose antler, a tuft of dog fur, and a piece of tundra cotton. We never really know whether Lucy simply likes the objects, or whether she grasps their import to an older Yup'ik subsistence lifestyle. The dog fur, of course, is a side effect of relying on huskies for transportation and/or companionship. The moose antler would signify a great achievement in furnishing many materials for the subsistence lifestyle. A moose might be the subsistence equivalent of a walking Target store. The tundra cotton, however, I'm not sure of. I...