North America: "Higher-Ups"

NORTH AMERICA  
 
I’m a big fan of the Pacific Northwest. I’ve never been north of the border up into western Canada but I’ve been around much of the land in Washington and Oregon from Olympic National Park, the Columbia River Gorge, and the Three Sisters Wilderness to Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland. It’s mind-bogglingly beautiful – and I haven’t even seen a fraction of all there is out there. I’d like to see the Cascades and, of course, all the Canadian Rockies all the way up into Alaska. Please send vacation donations to: Steve Prescott.  
For this book though, I didn’t get much of an opportunity to draw a whole lot of mountain scenery outside of the Cascade orks’ territory. And I didn’t get to touch anymore on the Pacific Northwest Native American style which I always find fun to do. But I still had fun with what I had to work with. Never illustrated an innuit cleaning fish before. Seemingly petty little things like that can sometimes catch my interest.  
My wife works with a girl that came from Novgorod, Russia so I can go to her for translations when necessary. In case you were curious, the Russian writing on the boat in the fish-cleaning piece, Arctic Smugglers, simply says: Sea Demon.