| This is the first sketch that I sent to MacDougall-Littell for a chapter about the black plague in Europe during 1348 in a 7th grade history textbook they were doing. It was a great project for me because they wanted the illustration to show the city of Siena, Italy, which was the first city I ever gave a tour to as a tour guide when I lived in Italy. Between that, and studying the plague during grad school, I was extremely excited to do this project. Because Siena is fairly modern, I modeled the background of the illustration after the city of Volterra, a nearby city that has a lot of its medieval architectural details still intact. The publisher supplied me with great reference for the costuming, and I found the wagon seen in the finished painting at a local historical society. For the bodies in the wagon I piled a bunch of friends in the back of a jeep, and then threw a sheet over them. The box I drew in the sketch shows where they intended to run type, and also the right of the page where I didn't draw much fades into more type. |
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