Dat Tay Vao
- DAT TAY VAO - A black ink and grey pencil drawing on an 11 x 14 size vellum paper. It appears in "Amazing, March, 1987," as a double page spread illustrating the story "Dat Tay Vao" by F. Paul Wilson.
I also did the lettering you see in the upper left part of the picture. It was done on a clear overlay sheet so it is not part of the drawing. Since the picture area there is dark and my lettering was black, I included instructions to print the lettering in white ink. I don't know why it wasn't done, someone in the editors office was sleeping on the job.
This is the kind of story that tests an illustrator's professionalism. It relates to a specific time and place in real history, and in this case the story location is Vietnam. The old Vietnamese man, the boat, and the soldiers that I decided to draw had to look authentic. And after going through my "morgue" files and coming up empty I took a trip to my local library. I managed to find a few books dealing with the Vietnam war that contained photos of all the subjects I needed for drawing my picture.
All my resource files (the morgue) are contained in a two-drawer file cabinet. But I must tell you that I once received a phone call from illustrator Dan Adkins who told me that he actually had "23 Four-drawer" file cabinets filled with resource material. I just can't imagine the room that those 23 cabinets took up, but what kind of index system does he have to find things in all those cabinets, because most pictures often contain several subjects of interest, like a picture featuring a great looking wild animal, an impressive landscape, good figures of a man and a beautiful woman in hunting attire, under a unique dramatic sky. In what folder do you put it?
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