Margaret

With all the disturbing and upsetting news out of Wisconsin, where police are shooting fathers in front of their children but letting juvenile delinquent murderers go home carrying their AK47s and put themselves to bed, it's not surprising that I fastened upon a quote from the marvelous Margaret Mead as a lifeline today, nor that it inspired me to make art out of it. The entire quote reads:

Years ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student expected Mead to talk about fishhooks or clay pots or grinding stones.
But no. Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thigh bone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink, or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal.
A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. "Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts," Mead said.

For some reason, although I am sure that Margaret was at a more venerable age when she revealed this truth, whoever sought it out paired it with a picture of Mead in her extreme youth. She's probably older than she looks in the picture, but she has such a homely, wholesome verging on girlish expression that I couldn't resist commemorating her in that aspect. (She also has some rather astonishing Frieda-esque eyebrows!) I didn't catch the likeness as well as I would have liked—her eyes are longer, and set wider in her face, which is slightly squarer than this—but making a colorful attempt to go with her quote was enough for today.

We are at our most civilized when we help others through their difficulties. Let us remember the sentiment as this year proceeds.

Pencil, Daler Rowney inks, watercolor, Uniball pen, gel pens, white gouache, on 140-lb. Strathmore watercolor paper, about 7x10.

Call for maps

As they do regularly, theydrawandtravel.com has issued a call for maps. As they put it, right now "most travel plans are a fantasy," so the new theme is "Out of This World," which consists of three options:

• An actual place: illustrate our solar system, the constellations, the path of a comet, or a trip to the moon
• A fictional place: draw a map of the setting from your favorite science fiction movie, series, book, or video game
• A fantasy place: conjure up an outer space dream from the depths of your imagination

I didn't find out about the challenge until yesterday, and the due date is August 30th, so initially I wasn't going to participate. I have many other things going on right now, and those maps typically have taken me as much as 40 hours of work apiece to do a preliminary sketch, find references, do a finished drawing, trace the drawing onto watercolor paper in pen, and do all the watercolor and lettering. That's basically every minute between now and 9 p.m. on August 30th!

But...I was drawn to option #2, being a science fiction kind of a gal, plus I've been on a roll during the month of August, working on all these wonky Deb Weiers projects, and thought it would be fun to incorporate some of my new techniques and materials—scribbling, dropping and merging Daler Rowney inks, using gel pens to elaborate, etc. So I decided that I would participate, but under specific rules for myself:

1. Their size requirement for submission is 16.667x6.25 inches. Have you ever tried to work that small when doing things by hand? The digital folks can work at any size they like, on-screen, and then output it at the proper proportion, but we hand-drawn people have to blow it up enough to get in all the little details. Previously when I have done these maps (or recipes for theydrawandcook) I have worked at half again the size, which is to say around 21 point something inches by 9.5 inches, which is a lot more doable. But for this one I decided I would work exactly to size, and keep my details simple enough to do so.

2. I am usually a planner and sometimes take weeks to decide what to include and how to arrange it all, but I decided to take another page out of Deb Weiers's book and be spontaneous. I had an idea for a couple of things to go in, so in they went, and then I just kept adding as inspiration struck. It's not nearly as detailed or complex as any of my other three, but I think it has atmosphere, at least.

I took as my theme a book that I think should be declared a classic and assigned in schools, due to the provocative philosophical and political conversations it sparks, as well as the fact that it's beautiful writing and a gripping story:  The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin. I'm not sure exactly how many times I have read it, but at least three and probably five, and it never gets old. And I thought it would be ideal to use as the subject of a fairly simple yet hopefully profound visual expression in a map for the contest.

I didn't call it a contest before because they aren't picking winners or giving prizes, but they will be putting their favorites into a book at some point. I won't qualify for the book, though, because in my quest for spontaneity, I forgot the caveat they put on their website about not locating any text or important content in the middle 1.25-inch of the map, which will fall into the fold in any book set-up, and half of my title falls precisely there. Oh well...it was a fun project and will perhaps inspire others.

I had many challenges in the course of this, including not leaving white paper under the dancing girl, so that her outfit came out darker than I would have preferred; for the first time ever, I put a wash over the Uniball pen and it RAN (I can only blame the humidity, it should have been dry for hours), so I had to redo several parts of the lettering in different colors to hide that; and just the sheer challenge of doing lettering at size instead of being able to work larger and cleaner. But...spontaneity again, and I did my best to clean up all the screw-ups. And I have to say, it's a lot easier to match up two scans than it is four!

I used the Daler Rowney inks plus watercolor, gel pens, white and black gouache, collage (a page out of the book), and a border I liked from Deb's stuff. The rest is me. And the goddess, Ursula K. LeGuin.

My muse is back...

There are certain people who are so hard to capture that I keep trying. My pal Kirsti is one of them. So I decided that the Deb Weiers method might be how I finally get at the essence of the person without a perfect likeness, and started snooping through her Facebook photos for "the one." She did end up giving me great inspiration, although it was her costume and makeup job that beckoned this time. I also gave her a little friend. He's fierce, but loyal.

On this one, I painted the background colors first (not the black, that came later), but I looked at the reference photo and put the colors in approximately the correct areas from the start. After it dried, I drew in the faces with pencil and did some preliminary painting before ever going in with drawing ink, which is a switch from my usual method but maybe works better? (I did much the same thing on "Portrait of Rosemary.") I had great fun embellishing this one, although I mostly stuck to the makeup job Kirsti had already painted on for Dia de los Muertos. The roses were also entertaining—while the paper was wet with the red ink, I took the hard end of the paintbrush and swirled it around to make rose shapes in the ink so I would have some guidance and texture when it dried.

The background was flat black at first, but I added some "stars" to alleviate its starkness. The border was white (I FINALLY remembered to mask off a border so there is room to frame, instead of painting all the way out to the edges), but I had a little bleed-through at the corners so I painted it a soft pinkie-orange and added a black line around all, and some corners, extending the stars outward. I also added some gold spots to the crow that mimic the ones around her eyes.

Daler Rowney inks, watercolor, white and black gesso, pencil, gel pens, Uniball, LuminArté gold paint, on Strathmore 140-lb. watercolor paper. (I ran out of my Fluid paper. The Strathmore is okay, though a little rougher in texture.)