World Turtle and the Last Dot
Jams2blues (James Lee), with Anna Lee
Dave Love, our bass player, asked me to draw a gift for his daughter. She loves turtles and has a pet turtle, so that was where I began. What surprised me was the world that came out of it.
World Turtle was only my second time using colored pencils, after Trippy Frog. I use digital pencils all the time, but I wasn't confident about what I could do with the physical ones. Somehow, all those years of blending and layering on a digital canvas paid off. I could draw from my imagination, using the full spectrum of colors in my Prismacolor Premier set, and watch something surreal and realistic patiently come into form.
It was satisfying and fun. There was chiaroscuro in all that color, light and shadow giving the turtle weight while the image kept becoming stranger. I used every color and technique I could think of.
I always improvise when I draw, and I usually don't know what I am going to end up with. I had drawn the turtle without thinking about a background. The animal was there, with the Earth rising across its shell, and then I had to find the space around it.
I improvised a galaxy with paint markers. Tiny, tiny dots in the background, then larger stars coming into the foreground. Slowly, with intention, I kept placing them.
The depth surprised me. It developed in those final stages, but the whole effect wasn't there until the last dot was placed. Suddenly, all those individual marks had become a space the turtle could exist in.
The pencils had been surprising me too. The soft tip of a sharpened Prismacolor pencil would deliberately disobey my demands for tiny details and color fill. I was learning the boundaries of the medium while using it, finding out what the thickness of a pencil would cooperate with and where it wouldn't. Those limits became part of the drawing. It felt as if the medium was bringing it to life and I was the vessel for it.
I drew the whole thing in about two days, only breaking to eat, shower and sleep. When I work, it is always at a marathon's pace. I can't seem to stop until whatever I am working on is finished. This one surprised me every step of the way.
Anna remembers about sixteen hours for Trippy Frog, and a similar amount for World Turtle. What she keeps coming back to is the person the drawing was made for.
"James has always liked to create things for people," she says. "He has written songs for people to cheer them up, he has cooked food specific to dietary restrictions and preferences, he has written poems and drawn doodles as gifts for family members."
Dave asked me for a turtle. It became a world, and then a galaxy gathered around it, one dot at a time. The whole thing was still a gift for someone who loves turtles.
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