Design & Execution

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...

In recent news, it seems that Lucy's Dance will be translated into a Yup'ik language edition by one John Toopetlook of the Alaska Native Language Center. Many thanks to John and the ANLC. Lucy's Dance deals largely with the suppression and revival of Curukaq , the Yup'ik potlatch/dance festival. In not-so-cheerful news, I have recently learned that native dancing has remained banned in certain bush villages until as recently as a year ago. Many Native Alaskans still feel vaguely guilty for reviving the tradition, as the idea that the dancing is idolatrous has been deeply ingrained. Lucy's Dance touches only briefly on the religious aspect, but the book's message still feels more relevant in light of this piece of news. Like last week's drawing, this week's is a gift-gathering montage. I spent some time cross-referencing photos of dogsleds. The sled I drew is not a cutout from any one photo that I found, but rather a composite of different common elemen...