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When I read April White’s “The Divorce Colony,” I was immediately captivated by the town of Sioux Falls, described by a newspaper at the time as a “colony of pretty but unhappy people.” White’s essay brilliantly evokes images of the dusty streets of the town in the late 1800s, with all its secrets and scandals. In my illustrations, it was important to get an accurate sense of Sioux Falls during this period, so I began by researching the town and the setting, picking out the important locations in the story. Megan Detrie, the producer on this project, provided me with access to an archive of photographs and illustrations.

For the main image, I wanted to show the protagonist of the story during the court case, dwarfed in the dock by the grand courtroom and observed by crowds of curious onlookers. This seemed like a relevant illustration, as it reflected the close scrutiny under which the divorcées led their lives in the town, observed and judged by the local people, the press, and one another. I wanted the artwork to have a classic feel, so I used a limited color palette, creating vignettes loosely referencing illustrations of the time.

Below is a series of images of the process, from rough sketches and research to final ink drawings.

Read “The Divorce Colony.”

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The process of creating the final artwork began by carefully sketching the drawings in pencil onto graph paper. Then, I trace the individual color layers for each image onto three different sheets of drawing film using a sable brush and black rotring ink. I start with the lightest tone, which will be a pale blue or pink in the final art. Once this is dried, I place another sheet of drawing film over the top, and then draw out the mid tone, which will often be the shadows, a darker blue in the final. Then, I place the final sheet on top and draw the darkest tone, usually the details and the focal points; this will be dark blue or black.

These are then scanned into Photoshop where each layer is assigned a different color. This process from my practice as a printmaker in which each color is drawn separately in black and then exposed onto a silk screen or lithographic plate and printed one color at a time onto paper.

These illustrations however, were created for a digital output, so instead of the print process, I scanned them into Photoshop and created the colored image there. Although the final output is digital, it is important to me to create all the markmaking by hand with ink and a brush, I think that this gives a liveliness and tactility to the image which I would struggle to achieve with a digital drawing process.