Skip to main content

LD6: Typefaces, Voices and Hair

The sixth illustration in Lucy's Dance shows Yup'ik Elders directing a meeting to plan Curukaq, the springtime potluck/dance festival that went unobserved for many years.


DESIGN NOTES

The room shown in my illustration is roughly based on the Community Hall in Stebbins, Alaska, but with a few adjustments. I intentionally created a bit of similarity in the arrangement of this crowd scene to that in illustration 2 to emphasize the return of the dance festival tradition. The Community Hall and the qasgiq (of traditional festivals) both serve as gathering places for events of village-wide interest, and deserve some visual comparison.

I may design custom patterns to embellish the qaspeks in this drawing as I did for Lucy's in my previous post, but for the moment, there's enough going on in this composition. The pattern may end up being a way of distinguishing Lucy's character in future images. Here' Lucy stands on the bench in plain clothes. I'll probably dress her in a qaspek for the potluck at the end.

Why do the characters have purple hair? Yup'ik Eskimo hair usually appears to be nearly black. Black is a heavy color against which I cannot draw lines of texture without changing my line color. I've seen both purple and blue used to suggest black in shadows in many other places. The idea is that if a color is used consistently enough, the eye recognizes it as neutral. Everything matches blue jeans -- except blue -- but would everything go with red jeans? In order to sustain this special status for purple, though, I can't really use purple heavily elsewhere in the drawing without upsetting the illusion.

A bit more on type:

A fellow designer mentioned that Futura, the typeface I have used in past illustrations, felt a little rigid. I experimented with a few other fonts and with italic versions of Futura, but ended up coming up with only one "softer" alternative: Adobe Caslon Pro, a friendly, unpretentious serif that could come from the body of a favorite novel.

For me, choosing a typeface for a story is like choosing a reader for an audiobook. After I realized this, I began to wonder which voices best represented the two fonts between which I'm debating. I decided:


Adobe Caslon Pro: Miette of Miette's Bedtime-Story Podcast (a terrific podcast, by the way, for lovers of short literary fiction)

These are very personal interpretations, and if any readers live in Denver and have arguments about the vocal equivalents of these or other fonts, I propose that we discuss it over overpriced coffee.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Deb VanasseFebruary 25, 2010 at 9:35 PM

    I love the way you've managed to infuse what might otherwise be a too-static scene with a sense of character and action. Interesting about the hair color. This is the first time I noticed the purple, and I can't decide whether it's only because you pointed it out or because there are lots of purple-headed people in the scene. Would dark brown work? From what I can tell, the type face looks nice.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Artifact Studies and Random Notes

In junior high school I collaborated on a project with a small, mostly-female group of students. We were to design a unique, fictional culture and build illustrative cultural artifacts. We would bury said artifacts in a cardboard box filled with soil. Another team would then excavate our artifacts and guess about our culture. After several days of creative deliberation, we designed a pyramid-based matriarchy wherein men were kept underground as slaves, brought out occasionally to build more pyramids. Elvis was God. According to the artifact of my memory, middle school was a confused and hostile culture. I began this week's illustrations, again, with visual research. I still don't know everything about these artifacts, but my Stebbins Dance Festival book has some interesting statements about them. Part of what I do know I impart below. According to their cultural artifacts, the Yup'ik people practice artful dancing to drums while waving furred objects. They also spend time ...
7 comments
Read more

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...
1 comment
Read more

Work from Home

  The reference for this piece is a known work of fine art: a photograph by Peter Mitchell, a lorry driver who traversed West Yorkshire and occasionally snapped photos. The piece is titled Eric Massheder, Leeds, (1975) . Eric is the man in the doorway, a drippings refinery worker who posed in his home, adjacent (really, attached) to the refinery where he worked for 12 years. Eric woke up in his home in the morning, walked one room (or so) over, and began his shift. I have changed and omitted a few details for the sake of composition as usual. I've now been working from home for about four years, and I make a similar commute without stepping outdoors. My house even resembles Eric's a bit, though there's no factory nearby. I enter my workplace by transferring a USB cable, which joins all of my input and output devices from my personal computer to my work laptop. I stoop under my desk to make the transfer, so possibly a similar amount of exercise is involved—the digital equiva...
Post a Comment
Read more