Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) was an American abolitionist best known for her association with the Underground Railroad, the secret network of safehouses run by abolitionist activists to help slaves escape to free states, territories, and British North America (now Canada). Originally named Araminta Ross, she was born into slavery. After she escaped in 1849, she personally led an estimated 70 others to freedom as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. During the Civil War, she was a nurse, scout, and spy for the Union army. Later she was an activist for women’s suffrage and established the Harriet Tubman Home for the Elderly. More information about her life can be found here.
This illustration was created for Learning A-Z as part of a larger project. I used black and white photographs as references, but the quality of the surviving images were not ideal.
Have you ever noticed that in the earliest black and white photos, the subjects always had very serious, sometimes even unpleasant, expressions on their faces? This is because early film wasn’t very light sensitive and required the subjects to stay perfectly still for a fairly long time. Sometimes for several minutes. Sometimes in bright sunlight. It’s difficult to hold a smile that long, so they usually didn’t. The reference photos I had of Tubman all left me with the impression that she was perpetually annoyed. But, since that’s probably the fault of the photographic technology rather than a true reflection of reality, I toned it down quite a bit. Still, I didn’t want to go too far and make her smiley instead. I settled for something fairly neutral.
Here’s our first president, George Washington. There were no photo references, of course, but there are quite a few paintings available that I was able to use as references. Again, this is an image created on commission for Learning A-Z.
My father-in-law recently passed away. My mother-in-law proceeded him in 2021. With both of them now passed, my husband and his siblings are in the midst of settling the estate, cleaning out the house, and selling most of it. Among other things, I inherited a freezer full of frozen sour cherries. There were gallons and gallons of them going back to 2019. Gary had a sour cherry tree in his yard and dutifully collected, pitted, and froze as much of the harvest as he could manage. But, since Cheryl had died earlier, he was not able to keep up on using them in baked goods. Heaven knows what he planned to do with them all, but they’re all mine now.
I already had a sour cherry pie recipe that works really well. (I’ll post that later.) But I wanted something other than just pie to do with them. So, I searched for a sour cherry muffin recipe on the internet and the first one in the search results (outside of the sponsored results section) was posted by a blogger who looks like she’s a cookbook author. The recipe was highly rated, and I followed the directions dutifully. To the author’s credit, it did make muffins. I’ll give her that. Unfortunately, the muffin part, between the cherries, tasted like nothing so much as plain buttermilk pancakes. Very floury buttermilk pancakes. I mean, it was adequate. But I’m not sure why it was at the top of Google’s search results.
With all those cherries in my freezer, I needed to do better. After looking through some other recipes and trying two test batches of my own version, I have a new recipe. Mine uses butter, almond extract, and a quarter cup of reserved cherry juice to give that batter some flavor. I creamed the butter with the sugar because replacing canola oil with butter can cause baked goods not to rise as well. Creaming softened butter with the sugar helps mitigate that. I also bumped the baking powder way up. (After confirming with other recipes that using more should be okay.) My muffins don’t rise super high, but they aren’t nearly as dense as the original recipe. If you want them even fluffier, you might try adding even more baking powder until you’re happy with them. Be warned, though. I’m not actually sure what happens if one uses too much baking powder.
WHY BUTTERMILK? The acidity activates the baking powder. It’s a chemistry thing. The cherry juice might be enough on its own because it’s also acidic, but I’m not sure. The original recipe used buttermilk and I just stuck with that.
ELECTRIC MIXER: You will need an electric mixer to cream the butter. A simple hand mixer is sufficient. If you want to use a spoon instead of a mixer, you can skip the creaming step, but the muffins will come out denser. You can also substitute an equal amount of canola oil for the butter, which will make the mixture a little easier to stir by hand, and will rise better, but it will contribute less flavor.
VARIATION: If you want to make chocolate chunk sour cherry muffins, replace up to half the cherries with the same amount of semi-sweet chocolate baking chunks. Fold them in along with the cherries.
FANCY: The original recipe called for 2 Tbsp. of sanding sugar as an optional topping sprinkled on after the batter is spooned into the muffin cups and before you put it in the oven. My grocery store does not carry sanding sugar, so I did without. You can try that if you want.
Chocolate Cherry Muffins
Sour Cherry Muffins
Ingredients
3/4 cups reduced fat buttermilk 1/4 cup reserved cherry juice 1 large egg 1/2 tsp. almond extract 2/3 cup softened, salted butter 1 cup sugar 2 cups all-purpose flour 2 1/2 tsp. baking powder 2 cups sour cherries (pitted, thawed, very well-drained)
Instructions
Preheat oven to 350° F.
Line standard-sized cupcake/muffin pan with paper or foil liners. Recipe yields 18-20 muffins.
Mix wet ingredients (buttermilk, cherry juice, egg, almond extract) in a bowl.
Cream butter and sugar in a bowl. Use an electric mixer on medium speed for 1-2 minutes until well combined and sort of fluffy.
Combine wet ingredients into creamed butter and sugar mixture.
Slowly add remaining dry ingredients (flour and baking powder). Mix on medium speed until well incorporated.
Fold in cherries.
Spoon batter into muffin cups. Fill 3/4 full.
Bake for 30 minutes but check at 25 minutes just to be sure. Muffins will be done when top is beginning to turn golden brown and an inserted toothpick comes out clean of batter.
Let rest a few minutes. When cool enough to handle, transfer to a cooling rack.
Our next historical figure (or celebrity, depending on how you categorize him) is Jackie Robinson. He was the first black baseball player in Major League Baseball. He played for the Brooklyn Dodgers and earned many accolades throughout his baseball career. Although he’s most famous for breaking the color line in MLB, he had a long history of activism throughout his life. More information on him can be found here.
I did my best to match the historical details of the uniform as well as to get the likeness reasonably accurate.
Continuing with our subset of illustrations of historical figures for Learning A-Z, this one is an illustration of Maria Tallchief, one of America’s first prima ballerinas and an Indigenous American. She was best known for her performance dancing the lead in “The Firebird” in 1949. More information about her can be found here.
The client wanted her pictured in something similar to her costume in “The Firebird”. But they didn’t want her in exactly that costume for copyright reasons. So, this costume is intentionally simpler than the iconic costume, but in the same color. Because all the images in this project were a standard height (the art itself, not the characters) I did have a bit of a problem with those feathers. They really should have been standing straight up, but that would have caused some problems if I had. Either I’d have had to make this one image taller than the standard size, which would throw off the layout, or I’d have to make this one character in a smaller scale than the rest of the characters, or I could make shorter feathers. When given these choices, the client decided to let the feathers hang sideways like this.
We’re done with professions. Now we’re moving onto historical figures. First up is Frida Khalo.
She was a famous in influential Mexican folk artist. More information on her can be found here.
When I draw figures who need to look like specific, real-life people, I use lots of references. I need the references to make sure that the likenesses at least resemble the real person, but I also have to be very careful not to outright copy any of the references because it’s important to respect everyone’s copyrights. It can be a little tricky when you’re trying to make them look recognizably like them, but not exactly like that particular reference photo or painting of them.
I had references for her face, hair, a tutorial on how she did the thing where she braided her scarf into her hair, and several photos of her in various outfits. The outfit she’s wearing here is not anything she was ever pictured in and probably never actually wore, but it has elements of outfits from reference photos. Color references were particularly useful, since so many of her photos were black and white. In all, the process is a bit like a collage.
Here’s an illustration of a police officer in uniform. This is the last illustration for the set of images depicting people in recognizable professions. This was made as part of a larger commission for the children’s educational publisher Learning A-Z.
One detail when drawing police for the children’s market is that you want to be careful about depicting guns. This might sound like a silly concern to have, but children’s publishing tends to be very sensitive about showing weapons. Particularly for the younger age ranges. Normally you just wouldn’t draw guns at all, but police in America are pretty much always armed. It would be weird to show them with an empty belt. It just wouldn’t quite look like a cop. But you also don’t want to show the weapon too blatantly for your audience. To solve this problem, I like to draw police officers turned slightly away from the viewer so that their hip holster is on the far side, either partially or completely hidden from view. In this case, she’s facing the viewer almost full-on, but her hand position obscures those blocky items on her belt. Undoubtedly one of those is her firearm, but it’s not too obvious.
This is a cartoon illustration of a commercial airline pilot in her traditional uniform. It was part of a larger commission for Learning A-Z. This set depicts diverse people with recognizable occupations.
I was pleased that this one called for a woman with short hair, since we hadn’t had many of those so far in the project. I also kept forgetting to add jewelry to people, since it was rarely mentioned in the specs. For this one I made a point to give her earrings and a wedding ring to make up for that previous oversight. I don’t remember why she didn’t get a pilot’s hat, but there was probably a reason.
Did you know that there is a reason the flight crew greets the passengers with one hand behind their backs like this? It’s nothing nefarious. They have a little counting device that they use to count the number of passengers that board the plane. They want to make sure it matches the number of tickets scanned. (Either stowaways or missing passengers would be bad.) They keep the device behind their back because they are trying to be discreet about it.
This is a cartoon illustration of a park ranger giving a presentation about a red-tailed hawk. This image is part of a subset of illustrations within the larger project depicting people with recognizable professions. The project was commissioned by Learning A-Z to be used in a Build-A-Book application for children. As always, the image was created digitally in Adobe Photoshop using my cintiq tablet.
This one was fun to draw because I used a photo reference from my own personal photos. This hawk is based on the one that came by years ago and perched on my back fence for several hours. It was a very good model and let me get very close to get some nice shots. So, drawing this brought to mind a memory of a really special afternoon for me.
This final image was also way different than the original specs. Originally, this was supposed to be a woman park ranger with a park map she was pointing to. But that pose was fairly unworkable if we wanted to both see the content of the map and have the woman viewed from the front, looking at the viewer at eye-level. Which they did. Also, holding an unfolded paper map usually requires two hands, then a third would be needed to point. Additionally, the specs for this section were too heavy on women, and we already had a Middle Eastern woman with a prosthetic leg previously in the project. That was why it was decided to switch this one to a man.
It was my suggestion to change the pose to the park ranger doing a nature presentation with an animal, which the client liked. I suggested several animals, but I was really hoping they’d go for the hawk. Which they did.
A cartoon illustration of a construction worker or contractor. He’s got the safety vest, helmet, ear protection, walkie talkie, probably even steel-toed boots. I think he’s the contractor, since he’s carrying the plans.
Karen B. Jones - Illustrator 