Design & Execution

So continues my unpolished sketching of illustration layouts for Lucy's Dance , a children's picture book dealing with the Yup'ik dance festival Curukaq . Layout sketches 5-8 show relatively modern settings, but still required some odd research. TECHNIQUE NOTES: Two of these illustrations are gift-gathering montages, which I will keep a bit abstract. I tried a few collage elements in the first gift montage just to see the effect. The color comes from an ink wash that I scanned and converted to different hues. KITCHEN: On this page, Lucy points out Apa's loss of appetite and sad demeanor, convincing her mother to re-initiate the festival of Curukaq in order to cheer him up. In order to do so, she uses the citizen's band radio, which sits at ready on the counter, like the Bat Signal. I drew two of my original character studies with this page in mind, so I decided to drop them in for layout purposes. When I was sketching Lucy's mom, I wasn't sure at first wh...

This week I sketched layouts for the first four illustrations of Lucy's Dance , Deb Vanasse's forthcoming picture book celebrating the Yup'ik dance festival/potlatch. These sketches are meant to be primitive rather than finished drawings. I've included some greeking (sample text) here to show where the story might appear. The wider images will fill two pages. These layouts may have to change a bit later to create a gutter for the binding crease. The first and third illustrations show overviews of the village, which is inspired by the village of Stebbins, Alaska. My setting studies helpfully acquainted me with a view of the Stebbins coastline. The first view shows the village in its original state, with kayaks, a fish-drying rack, and winter subterranean dwellings called qasgiq and ena . The opening words of Lucy's Dance mention the potlatch, called Curukaq , so I wanted to show the potlatch somewhere in the first picture. In the book, Stebbins Dance Festival , Y...

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 ...

I promised further discussion of the Curukaq festival and its customs, but I've decided to save that bit for later, for there are many entries ahead of me. Also, I appear to have written a short novel in the place of my last entry, and I'd like to keep this installment relatively terse. This week I continue my study sketches for Lucy's Dance , a children's book by Deb Vanasse that celebrates Yup'ik culture, specifically the Curukaq potlatch festival. I have heard recently that a group of students and teachers from Stebbins, Alaska (the town that inspired the story), may be perusing my blog. I invite them to correct me on any point, or better yet, to send photos of their gymnasium and their general landscape during the months when Curukaq would normally be recognized. When I first set out to create setting studies, I envisioned myself drawing and naming lots of plants, weather, etc. However, a brief perusal of the manuscript informed me that the better part of Lu...

It seems I will be spending my winter months thinking about Alaska again, for I'll have the pleasure of illustrating a picture book by Deb Vanasse . The book is titled Lucy's Dance , and will be published by the University of Alaska Press in Spring of 2011. I will post scraps of my illustration and the research behind them, trying not to muddle the cultural details too awfully. Mind you, I'm only giving you the chocolate coating of the story. You haven't seen the last of the snail fallacies, but they may enter hibernation for the winter. Potlatch Raillery, Bingo Ladies Cracking Wise Lucy's Dance deals with the fading tradition of the the potlatch celebrated by the Yup'ik people of western Alaska. The central character is a Yup'ik girl named Lucy who prods her village to resurrect the Curukaq (choo-ROO-gawk), or the Challenge Festival, also known as the Messenger Feast, or potlatch. Lucy's mother explains that the tradition is no longer recognized beca...

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...

This week's common nonsense is the fallacy known as ad ignorantium , or the Argument from Ignorance. I prefer to remember it as the Argument from Uncertainty, as uncertainty seems more relevant to the definition. The fallacy occurs when I try to prove my argument by pointing out that no one has proven it false. The flamingos in my yard are real until they melt in your bonfire. This fallacy is very much like shifting the burden of proof . . . it's taking the benefit of unproof, twisting doubt in your favor when neither side can really make a solid case. I always suspect it must take a face like Ben Kingsley 's to commandeer uncertainty in this way and take it for a pleasure drive. I just saw him in the 1996 Shakespeare-based film Twelfth Night . I thought for the first two acts that his character was an an eccentric nobleman. As it turns out, he played the role of the Clown. Maybe Kingsley's stage presence lends him authority by default, though one could also argue that...