LD2: Seasickness and Horror Vacui

Draw, erase, draw, erase. Sometimes the illustration process rocks back and forth, boatlike. I use my digital eraser as much as I do my drawing tip for grooming lines. I spend ages zoomed in, which is incredibly handy, though it usurps my sense of scale. Zooming can be especially dangerous when I'm drawing human limbs, which may appear witch-doctored upon zoom-out. Another zoom hazard is the temptation to fill every inch with detail befitting the myopic scale--simply because you can. Some artists (myself included) have trouble saying done when empty areas still gape on the page. Horror vacui is a fear of unfinished patches, like open wounds, indicating negligence, laziness, or worse, surrender of imagination. My introduction to layout and typography has somewhat disabused me of the compulsion to fill, but the rocking motion of drawing can bring it out again.

This week's drawing demanded that I pack my two-page spread with complexity, both visual and cultural. As I lifted my stylus to begin, an ant-farm of new factual snags poured into my head, and I scoured my books and photos for physical details, often to no avail. How many feathers on a man's dance fan? (Five.) Yup'ik men's hair--how was it traditionally worn? (Not sure.) Did they shave? (Again, nothing.) And that image I took for a men's light shirt turned out to be a raincoat, which probably no one would wear while dancing. Yup'ik men sometimes removed upper layers as the dance progressed, and water-tight seal intestine doesn't seem like the ideal choice for a breathable sub-layer.

I'm currently waiting on several sartorial details from the Alaska Native Heritage Center. In the meantime, I've left the men's upper-body clothing pretty plain, a monochrome, masculine version of the qaspeq, so if it looks as though the men are dressed to watch a favorite team play football after the Dance Festival, that's why. I am working from the following description of men's apparel in a book called The Eskimo About Bering Strait (1900).

I have simplified in other ways, too. After drawing the log-cabin structure of qasgiq (lodge) setting, I switched off the layer and found that I enjoyed the drawing much more when all the focus shifted to the foreground/people. It seemed a pity to omit the inside view of the traditional structure (esp. after the drawing time invested), so I made the lodge lines mostly transparent rather than scrapping them altogether. I have also omitted some of the background figures from the original layout because the qasgiq itself is a smaller space than I realized, and the scale would have been off.

I had planned to draw all of the colors from textured watercolor swatches, as I did in Illustration 1. However, building in all those masked images exploded the document size and slow processing ensued. I decided instead to paint with solid colors to create shapes that I could later fill with the texture if I chose. In the meantime, everything worked faster. The flat colors leapt out from the textured background more powerfully than the cumbersome paper texture, so I left the colors smooth and will try to maintain the look in other illustrations.

Draw, erase, draw, erase, zoom out, zoom in, draw, erase, save. I find drawing very relaxing, but the occasional distraction of audiobooks and podcasts can ward off seasickness. I've recently become a huge fan of the LSAT Logic in Everyday Life podcast, which a friend recommended after reading some of the snail fallacy posts.

Side note:

Author Deb Vanasse informed me that the UA Press might publish a Yup'ik translation of Lucy's Dance. The number of speakers of Central-Alaskan Yup'ik is estimated at roughly 13,000 -- larger than I expected. Lucy's Dance is about preserving and refreshing traditions, and printing a Yup'ik edition would reinforce that message with action.