The Trail is a collaborative comic of the Chilkoot Trail created by participants in Skagway, Alaska, on the Chilkoot Trail, and in Whitehorse, Yukon in August 2013. It is a large scale map of the Chilkoot Trail from Skagway to Bennett.
Journalist Genesee Keevil wrote a short article on the Chilkoot Artist Residency for the Summer 2014 issue of Galleries West Magazine. Read More…
A few great comics done by hikers did on the trail last summer… Read More…
Here is a link to my Chilkoot Packing List and here are few notes on things I found useful to bring on the trip.
I thought I would post our meal plan for our two week trip on the Chilkoot Trail for future artists in residence since it was such a challenge for us to figure out our meals for such a long trip.
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The Arctic Brotherhood was a secret society or fraternal association formed by men on their way to the gold rush. Apparently it was started in the saloon or dining room of a ship on its way to Skagway before the men had even landed in the north. Membership was restricted to white men over the age of 18 who resided in Alaska or Yukon. They did not allow women, the indigenous people who actually had lived in the north for millenium or likely anyone who wasn’t white. Read More…
As a warm up exercise at the comic workshops I did in Skagway and Whitehorse, we created a bunch of creature drawings by adding details with markers to watercolour brush strokes. You can also do this activity as a more collaborative drawing exercise by getting one person to do the brush stroke, one to turn it into a creature and one other person to add details. There is more instructions on the Vancouver Draw Down site. Read More…
I finished up the drawing, inking and scanning of the large (3 feet by 8.5 feet) base map/drawing of the trail for the collaborative comic we will be working on in the workshops in Skagway and Whitehorse.
It took me awhile to figure out how large to make it and how to scan so many pieces on my small scanner. I wasn’t sure either if Photoshop would crash with such a large image but I scanned it at a lower resolution (300 dpi) and it worked fine. I pieced it in Photoshop and drew over any lines that were wonky.
I love this panorama shot from 1899 of the White Horse Rapids that were rapids of the Yukon River, near to and the namesake of what is now the town of Whitehorse. According to Wikipedia, the rapids were named because they resembled the mane of a charging white horse.
On my trip up north in 2005, I was surprised to find RVs and even some tents camped in the parking lots of big box stores. There are even books and websites dedicated to Walmart camping and review sites.
