LD10: Tricky Shading and the Backspin

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's difficult to tell whether this would seem to surreal or unfamiliar. I'm eager to hear outside opinions on the matter, especially (but not only) from my Yup'ik readers.

Speaking of ethnicity portrayed, I have also darkened the skin tone in this image relative to prior images. In some photos, I don't notice that the Yup'ik skin color is significantly darker than Caucasian skin, though it's difficult to factor out sun exposure that accompanies the subsistence lifestyle. In terms of political correctness, I was unsure whether to err on the side of lightness or darkness. It seems that recently, some illustrators have provoked criticism for blanching out ethnic characters. One article mentions a cover illustrated by Diana Sudyka, one of my favorite illustrators. Recently, Sudyka's depiction of an African-American character earned protest from bloggers for being too pale. I think it's always a bit tricky for an illustrator to depict the "characteristics" of an ethnicity other than his or her own. I admit, it was comforting to learn that an artist whom I admire struggled with some similar issues.

I could approach the problem by listing a string of Yup'ik features, but this approach immediately feels eerie and clinical. I prefer to page through a pile of photos, then draw impressions mixed from what I have seen, working to include variety. Of course, in this particular drawing, most of the characters' faces are obscured or oversimplified due to the angle and distance.

Another small change: in response to a suggestion, I've decided to remove Apa's parka in this scene and instead show him from behind. Wearing it indoors might be disrespectful at a potlatch, and also a little too unabomber-esqe.

In a final cultural note, I'd like to add that I watched at least 10 break-dancing videos to ascertain that the shown backspin and Zulu spin moves are depicted here as they would really be performed by kids who had seen them once on TV.

LD9: The Story Knife

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'm aware that in a pinch, some Yup'ik people would stuff grass and plants inside their mukluks as insulation, and tundra cotton looks like a more welcoming plant than most others. Otherwise, I can't find any direct online references to uses of tundra cotton. Yup'ik women did weave, but usually the material came from the fur of musk-ox collected from where it accumulated on shrubbery. Any thoughts or ideas on the use of tundra cotton are welcome.

You've seen Lucy's family's collection of gifts, a mixture of the contemporary and traditional. Decades ago, handmade gifts might have included: food, skins and furs, dolls, knit goods, carvings, other tools, basketry woven from grass, parkas, mukluks, or qayaks. While I was researching Yup'ik crafts, I learned about the story knife, which may or may not have been gifted at potlatches. It seems that women passed it down through families, as women hold a special place as storytellers within Yup'ik culture. The knife is carved from ivory and used to sketch and inscribe pictures in the ground while telling a story. I can't help but make comparisons to my Wacom stylus, which is not made of ivory, but still plenty of fun.

I asked the author, Deb Vanasse, why she chose the three elements to represent Lucy's gift. She responded that she chose them more for their emotional resonance than for their practical importance, "because each would have a story behind it." Vanasse added, "In truth, the book is as much about Lucy’s gift as her dance; in essence, the dance is her gift, much as the dancing tradition is a gift both to and from the Yup’ik culture."

Her comment reminded me that drawing the three objects in this illustration was a good deal simpler than drawing Lucy's "larger" gift will be. On that note, I'm headed back to my story knife.

LD8: From the Warmth of My Carhartt

In recent news, it seems that Lucy's Dancewill 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 Dancetouches 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 elements -- the flat front, the angled brace in the back, the twine-wrapped joint and handle. Because I wanted to show part of Lucy's father's structural planning, I decided to sketch dimensions around the sled. The dimension numbers are drawn from a particular "how to" guide. The curves of the sled are created either by making the sled from "green" wood, or via steaming. I imagine that finding the right wood pieces has been difficult for the residents of Stebbins, Alaska, who live on a largely treeless tundra.

This image includes a more contemporary artifact of import: the Carhartt "Duck" work jacket. Carhartts are so ubiquitous among central Alaskans that even had I included the logo, it would hardly count as advertising. Everyone in my hometown of Fairbanks knows about them, so it's really just a matter of deciding, at a young age, whether or not warm, tawny canvas is your style. I wouldn't be surprised if the cold-weather gear one day claims a special lighted glass exhibit in the UAF museum, near the qaspeks and mukluks.

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.

LD6: Typefaces, Voices and Hair

The sixth illustration in Lucy'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 dress her in a qaspek for the potluck at the end.

Why do the characters have purple hair? Yup'ik Eskimo hair usually appears to be nearly black. Black is a heavy color against which I cannot draw lines of texture without changing my line color. I've seen both purple and blue used to suggest black in shadows in many other places. The idea is that if a color is used consistently enough, the eye recognizes it as neutral. Everything matches blue jeans -- except blue -- but would everything go with red jeans? In order to sustain this special status for purple, though, I can't really use purple heavily elsewhere in the drawing without upsetting the illusion.

A bit more on type:

A fellow designer mentioned that Futura, the typeface I have used in past illustrations, felt a little rigid. I experimented with a few other fonts and with italic versions of Futura, but ended up coming up with only one "softer" alternative: Adobe Caslon Pro, a friendly, unpretentious serif that could come from the body of a favorite novel.

For me, choosing a typeface for a story is like choosing a reader for an audiobook. After I realized this, I began to wonder which voices best represented the two fonts between which I'm debating. I decided:

Futura: Ira Glass (of This American Life)

Adobe Caslon Pro: Miette of Miette's Bedtime-Story Podcast (a terrific podcast, by the way, for lovers of short literary fiction)

These are very personal interpretations, and if any readers live in Denver and have arguments about the vocal equivalents of these or other fonts, I propose that we discuss it over overpriced coffee.

LD4 and 5: Plane State

In my recent two single-page illustrations for Lucy's Dance, I've held back a few details to keep things simple. Simplicity doesn't always come naturally when you're drawing a kitchen in use. For a better understanding of the story, double-click the images and read the captions.





















1. I nearly drew in a TV on the table in front of Apa, but decided at the last minute to research to ascertain whether TV is actually a utility in Stebbins, Alaska. Stebbins does, after all, call itself a subsistence town. The answer is yes, TV is available (though uncommon), but in the end I left it out because I decided that it would change the meaning of the scene too dramatically. Suddenly, the conflict of the story would have become Curukaq vs. The Price is Right, and Apa's extended, silent reverie loses some enigma; he could be waiting to find out the market value of an RV.

2. Lucy and Apa wear semi-tradtitional clothing. I decided to work a home-grown pattern into Lucy's qaspeq. I thought of drawing curtains made from the same fabric, but then I recalled the dilemma of Andrew Largeman in Garden State:


Dressing Lucy's mom in a qaspeq for a typical morning seemed a bit heavy-handed somehow, so I didn't.

3. The chair is one of my favorite elements and may be repeated on the cover. Admittedly, I would rather look at it than sit in it.





















4. Several Stebbins residents have informed me that fry bread is properly and popularly eaten with peanut butter. Thus, the jar in Lucy's Mom's hands.

5. Most remote villages like Stebbins are accessible mainly by bush plane; there are no formal roads. And yes, there are calendars devoted to Alaskan bush planes. I'm not sure I understand the calendar idea. Bush planes are the opposite of my chair; flying in them is great fun, but I'm not sure I'd want to look at them all the time.

6. I thought of coloring the background details here (calendar and frame), but decided to leave them muted to keep the emphasis on the foreground.


7. If you notice my typefaces vacillating a bit, it is because I am undecided as to whether I prefer Futura or Avant Garde. I am also uncertain whether I will have absolute say in this matter, but your vote would still count with me.

8. Finally, I've revised the clouds in the my most recent drawing. My previous clouds were modeled after an actual photo of the Stebbins landscape, and I did enjoy the effect of their odd arrangement, sitting like sliced meringue on the coastal bluffs. When I back away, though, I admit that they are a bit visually confusing. Hopefully, clouds 2.o look more obviously cloudlike.

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 tolerant fellow as missionaries go, translating and publishing prayers so that they could be spoken in Native Alaskan languages.

Author Deb Vannasse and I agreed on short descriptions of the illustrations before I began drawing at all. This piece was meant to include a priest in a fairly desolate image of the village. As a visual narrator, I did my best to depict the priest as well-intentioned rather than oppressive. He should, I decided, appear a little disconnected, introspective, and absorbed in his own faith. (Note: I tried to draw all five decades on the rosary, but they just didn't show up from a distance).

I have placed the priest with his back to the small cabins that began to populate the Stebbins landscape as the Yup'ik people became less nomadic, probably sometime in the 1930s. The UAF photo archives provided one image of such a cabin. Kathy Willie, a Stebbins woman who remembers this period, recalls that the first few huts were constructed from logs and scrap wood. Kathy's family used wood remnants from an empty brothel in nearby St. Michaels to build their house.

DESIGN NOTES:

I had a field day drumming up with simplified patterns and textures to depict the water and landscape. From here on I'll be drawing more contemporary, indoor scenes, using similar design elements to keep the look consistent.

For variety, I shifted the view of the landscape a bit from the layout sketch. This allowed me to draw the most expensive and sought-after gift that could be given at Curukaq: a hand-made qayaq. So far, I'm sticking to my formula of making background elements textured and people/foreground relatively flat.

Sadly, the Jesuit garb does not commonly come in the fruity breakfast-cereal colors that I used to add depth to my previous illustration. However, considering that I'm going for stark and somewhat desolate, the muted colors feel appropriate.

The inset in the bottom corner shows dance sticks and drums banished to a closet in the potlatch-free years. One of the dance sticks is a fur animal tail on a stick, which I'm not sure comes across in the drawing, so it may see the eraser end of my stylus.