Hello fellow destroyers of mugs,
My archaeological illustration started off much the same as everyone else’s. Because my family doesn’t always throw stuff away, I had a fine collection of chipped mugs to choose from. I ended up with a mug that already had a chunk broken off because my parents felt it would be more of a challenge. Lucky me. The mug in question shows a Dilbert cartoon where the dog is saying “Let me drop everything and work on your problem.”
My parents, spoilers of fun that they are, also insisted on safely wrapping up the mug in a plastic bag and towel before I shattered it into as many pieces as I could. A radical idea.
I was, however, disappointed at the surprising resilience of ceramic and its steadfast determination to break only at one point per hit. Of course, it never shows this resilience when you accidentally break something, but such is the nature of the universe I guess.
After making sure to break the handle that had somehow remained intact, I was ready to begin the process of trying to draw my sherd. I still have a lot of work to do on my drawing, but I think it is going well. Although I am getting flashbacks to when I last took geometry with all the tracing paper.
Like most of the class, I have some thoughts about what Ally said about how an illustrator is supposed to highlight what they think is most important. My problem, that a lot of people have already brought up, is how this could lead to erasure of something the illustrator deemed unimportant, but is actually significant in some way. It brings up too many reminders of how history has been whitewashed or sanitized in the past for me to be entirely comfortable with it. Obviously, that isn’t what Ally was suggesting, but it does make me wonder what revelations might be lost to history as someone in the past – a historian, illustrator, publisher, whoever – decided that a detail was less important. On the other hand, it makes me wonder what I have dismissed as less important that I should have paid more attention to.
Transgression In Action 
Dear James,
I’m glad to see you are having some fun with the project. I definitely wish I had more homework that required me to break stuff. I also agree on your point about what Ally said. Obviously I don’t think she really meant it in that way, but it does make you wonder what consequences there are from second hand history.
Max
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