Design & Execution

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...

Draw, erase, draw, erase. Sometimes the illustration process rocks back and forth, boatlike. I use my digital eraser as much as I do my drawing tip for grooming lines. I spend ages zoomed in, which is incredibly handy, though it usurps my sense of scale. Zooming can be especially dangerous when I'm drawing human limbs, which may appear witch-doctored upon zoom-out. Another zoom hazard is the temptation to fill every inch with detail befitting the myopic scale--simply because you can. Some artists (myself included) have trouble saying done when empty areas still gape on the page. Horror vacui is a fear of unfinished patches, like open wounds, indicating negligence, laziness, or worse, surrender of imagination. My introduction to layout and typography has somewhat disabused me of the compulsion to fill, but the rocking motion of drawing can bring it out again. This week's drawing demanded that I pack my two-page spread with complexity, both visual and cultural. As I lifted my ...

This week I publish my first pseudo-complete illustration for Lucy's Dance in the form of a landscape. I used to have a marked aversion to rendering landscapes. I pretended that the subject matter was just too traditional and that I was edgier than the plein air crowd, but the truth is that landscapes, as painting subjects, require a very contemporary stomach for abstraction that I sometimes lack. I am an instinctive illustrator, interested in defining shapes clearly. As such, I once twitched a little at the prospect of painting landscape forms (foliage, distant objects, etc.) that I couldn't honestly identify. I preferred to identify all parts of my subject, then render them to my satisfaction, using a ruler if necessary. I experienced a mix of envy and horror while watching impressionists swab away, working right through the nebula of colors and forms. A blob for a human head, then a similar blob for part of a tablecloth. Was this justice? I eventually learned that the best...

This Christmas, I find myself surrounded with a banquet of non-electronic sources of entertainment, including silly putty, books, family, as well a literal banquet. However, I also find myself without internet for some ten days this Christmas. Today, the withdrawal symptoms have been punctuated with a trip to a local Panera. I feel like an alcoholic slipping down to the corner bar, only my cup contains mango ceylon tea which delivers a fresh smack of fishtank pebbles with each sip. The wi-fi, however, is slicker than I-80 in January. In a brief (and and slightly overdue) detour from Lucy's Dance , the book for which I will shortly produce my first polished illustration, I thought I'd post a Christmas illustration I recently revised for Buffalo Exchange . The request: "I'd like to show a bunch of buffalo pulling Santa's sleigh, which will be driven by a [Star Wars] stormtrooper . . . all drawn in the approximate style of Ralph Steadman ." I did my best. ...

In past weeks my layout sketch allotments for Lucy's Dance have included up to 4 double-page layouts. This week demanded a mere 3 single pages (the final illustration and two covers) . . . and an inset of a dance stick to illustrate the educational postscript. The latter doesn't really have a "layout," per se, but I thought I'd sketch it anyways to get a start. LAYOUT 17--LUCY'S DANCE: At the end of the Curukaq festival, Lucy dances at last, hovering over a final view of Stebbins, Alaska. I used Google Maps to confirm the shapes of buildings shown in fuzzy photographs. Lest anyone think I'm lazily echoing the view from illustrations 1 and 2, know that I first rendered Stebbins from an entirely different view before I decided to show the same coast and buildings again. It didn't work out. Not only do I prefer this view compositionally, but I like the way using a similar vantage shows the progression of time. I may shift the angle of one of the earlie...

In this week's layout sketches for Lucy's Dance , Lucy shyly presents to Apa her homemade gift: a piece of dog fur, a sprig of tundra cotton, and the tip of a moose antler, all bound to a crooked stick with red yarn. The gift is is a child's version of the traditional Yup'ik dance stick, which Yup'ik men adorn with figurines, tundra cotton, and other embellishments that represent their memories and achievements. Inspired by Lucy's gift, Apa recalls the origins of the three gift parts, then launches into an enthusiastic traditional dance, indicating how much he missed participating in the festival of Curukaq . On previous pages, Apa's character is reticent, withdrawn into his parka. I wonder whether the thoughts in Apa's covered head sound at all like the words of the speaker in one of my favorite Old English Anglo-Saxon poems, The Wanderer . Below is a modernized excerpt: Where is the horse gone? Where the rider? Where the giver of treasure? Where are th...

This week brings a third installment of rough layout sketches of illustrations for Lucy's Dance , a picture book about Yup'ik culture by Deb Vanasse. At this point in the book, Lucy's small Alaskan village has decided to host a Curukaq , or potlatch dance festival, in order to satisfy Lucy's demands and cheer up Lucy's apa (grandpa). Traditionally, Curukaq involves competitive gift giving that requires months of prior handicraft and collecting of materials. Lucy's family members work to collect and their gifts, but Lucy does not have money to purchase or skill to build much for anyone. Instead, she hunts around the house for gift-able items--beneath her bed, in a closet, in her mukluks, and in her backpack. Lucy finds three items: a tuft of animal fur, a piece of antler, and a swab of tundra cotton. I have always approved the of the practice of poking around the house for anything I can reuse or give away. I have a pesky feeling that there are a dozen differen...