LD7: The Bunny Boots of Intention

There'll be no more further personification of typefaces as NPR-style voices in this entry. You have my word.

The next few illustrations for Lucy's Dance will include gift-gathering montages that focus on one or two characters at a time. This can be refreshing after drawing a large crowd scene, which takes significantly more attention to detail. Here I have more room to play with texture and visual style. Each two-page gift-gathering spreads combines several action scenes that overlap a bit. In each, I show insets of the gift being gathered or earned. Lucy's brother chops firewood with boots floating above his head, showing his intent. The story calls for store-bought boots. I think I loosely and subconsciously based this pair on my dad's army surplus boots, also known as "bunny boots." The boots contain insulation coated in rubber, and are extremely heavy. My siblings and I used to lace my youngest brother into them when he was four to keep him from wandering around.

My intent here, in contrast, is not to hinder children using bunny boots. This book targets a fairly young age group, so I hope that the presence of the floating objects won't be too confusing. I appeal to any readers who have kids ages 4-8; do you think that floating gifts will throw young readers? Showing the objects in some capacity is necessary. For example, the illustration showing Lucy's dad building a dogsled should include a picture of a complete dogsled somewhere to put an image to the word. If I include the sled, part of the drawing must either leap forward in time (to show the finished product), or show intention, so a little bit of abstraction is unavoidable. I'm not really a fan of the thought bubble, which might be even more confusing to a four-year-old. For now, it seems best to let the object stand on its own.

I also show the outside of the house transforming to become the inside of a room; the shared line and colors add coherence to the design. I should point out, however, that the spine will bisect this illustration somewhat, dividing it to create two separate spaces, though the yarn causes some overlap. Hmm. I'll include a divided version to show this.

Thoughts and suggestions are welcome.

Comments

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...

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Design & Execution

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