The Girl Who Married Her Dog

-November-

This is a dry-point etching, and it's the second print that I did on Eskimo folk tales. This one was on the story of the girl who married her dog.

Once, there was a beautiful girl who refused to get married. Every time someone
proposed to her, she would turn them down, no matter how strong, brave, or
skilled they were. This frustrated her father, who was coming to believe that
she would never marry. In fact, she didn't even seem to like anyone except her
dog. One day, in frustration, her father yelled, 'Why don't you just marry your
dog!' The dog liked this idea, to say the least, and together he and the girl
ran off to an island in the bay. There, the girl had a litter of puppy-children,
and the dog would swim off every day to get food for them. However, the girl's
father liked his puppy-grandchildren and was frustrated that he couldn't see
them, so he killed the dog and started bringing them raw meat every day in his
kayak. One day, when the dog-children ran up to the kayak and ate all the meat
and were licking the blood off of the kayak, she cried, 'Eat him, my children!'
Her dog-children leaped up and killed her father and ate him. Then, the girl
took off her shoes and made them into boats for her children and said, 'One of
you will go to the South and become the red man. There you will wander and be
able to find enough to eat. One of you will go to the East and become the white
man. You will settle and grow your food. And the last one, you will go North-
there isn't much there, so eat whatever you can find.' And this was how the
Inuit people began.

This etching was difficult, because it's hard to make etchings since plexiglass is hard and the tools aren't sharp, but this is what I managed to come up with. Overall, line and value contributed to it the most, and I think that the composition was the strongest part since it added a lot of interest with one of the dog-children leaving its mother behind on the island. However, this would have been better if plexiglass wasn't so hard ir if the tools were sharper, since I was only able to get simple and minimalistic detail.