Design & Execution

This installation of Black Wolf of the Glacier drawings should probably appear in black, a tone of mourning. Since I last posted illustrations, I have lost the company of my generously-sized Intuos3 Wacom, the drawing tablet I used to complete all of my illustrations for Lucy's Dance . I never went as far as naming it, but its flat grey countenance had borne the tracing of some of my best current line drawings. It weathered my dropping it, tripping on its cord, and sullying it with foodstuffs enough that like the Velveteen Rabbit, it became real. Then a loose power cord did it in at last. and I watched its blue connection LED flicker away like a fairy, and yes, I did try clapping it back to life. When hope seemed distant, I also resorted to prying it open and looking inside, but it was no use. My new wireless Intuos4 is pulling its slight weight. The smaller 8x5" surface doesn't feel restrictive, considering I draw primarily from my wrist; rather, it makes each movem...

Here's what's happened in illustrations 1-8:  We know that a Romeo the wolf enjoys roaming the forest, perching majestically on rocks, and breakfasting on small, furry animals. We know that a young girl and her dog live in the area and enjoy recreating on forest trails. We've been here before. Remember Red Riding Hood? Peter? A trio of pigs?  The suspense behind pages 9-17 rests on layer after layer of cautionary folklore about wolves. If wolves are at large, and if one owns a brick house, one stays inside and stops up one's chimney. Those brazen enough to hazard the woods alone might find themselves and their grandparents being freed from a canine esophagus by the business end of a woodsman's axe. And that's in the happy version of the story. Those old fairy tales didn't pull any punches. I can still feel those anti-wolf instincts when I hear even the cheerful part of Tchaikovsky's theme to Peter and the Wolf . But seasons change--stories, like layer...

Let's pretend that you're an unsuspecting pug-dog on a day trip near Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, Alaska. Let's pretend that you throw caution to the wind and wander a little out of leash-radius without even wearing your hand-knit sweater. Before you know it, you find yourself snatched up in the jaws of a black wolf, carried out of rescue range, and suddenly acutely aware that you are shape and size of a meatloaf. What are your odds of survival? Odds are pretty good, it turns out, if the wolf is Romeo--the main character of Black Wolf of the Glacier , a forthcoming book by Deb Vanasse. Now you see why I am back from my blogging hiatus. Black Wolf will tell the true (if somewhat apocryphal) story of Romeo, a wolf who frequented the Mendenhall Glacier near Juneau, Alaska. Romeo never appeared with a pack, but fraternized regularly with local and visiting dogs. He was known for approaching people and dogs without menace or interest in food, though he was...

When I was seventeen, I filled a one-month vacancy at a historically-themed boardwalk called Alaskaland .* All the shops were housed in reclaimed pioneer cabins, and I was required to wear a very Presbyterian-looking calico frock to maintain historical authenticity. My job was to man the counter in a historically-inauthentic soft-serve ice cream establishment called Frosty Paws. Frosty Paws' owner was a stickler for consistency. Our flavor selection ranged a whopping six flavors, and never more than four at once. The owner required that I weigh my sweet creations after dispensing them in order to assure a standard 8 or 16-oz. serving. Before the month was out, my cone-holding wrist could count to 8 oz. as well as any dealer of addictive substances. Furthermore, I had mastered the symmtrical twirl of the cone to create a regular spiral, an art which later, in the college cafeteria, lent me that charming, robotic air that every freshman covets. How would I have reacted if Ralph Wal...

The slippery slope  fallacy posed an obstacle to my creative process. Someone else has already come up with a memorable, concrete metaphor. I suppose I could have thrown up my hands and drawn a snail at a water slide, but that would have been a cop out. This blog is about (mostly) original material. The slippery slope fallacy involves predicting that one small move, say, dropping a hook, will ignite a series of actions that lead to whale-sized results. Once you give them an inch, start down that path, open that can of worms, the worms escape and chastise you for your horrible taste in canned food. The fallacy knits causes and effects together as if they are logically connected.  If they happen to be logically connected, you don't really have a fallacy. You have a valid prediction. In the case of my fish, however, fallacy abounds.  The food chain doesn't always work in nesting-doll order, from large to small. Sometimes slender lampreys feed upon the skin of larger sh...

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...

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...

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 wanderi...

The sixth illustration in Luc y'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 dre...