Ah, Coyote. He’s one of the many glories of Native American folk stories and, for me, perhaps the prime glory. He’s a lot like the fox in European folk stories, in that he can be good or bad, wise or foolish, or all of these things at 
once. In short, he’s very human, and that’s why I love him. Now, after seemingly endless airbrushing, I’ve finally finished work on one of my favourite Coyote stories. It’s a Cheyenne tale, and one of the places you can find it is in the fantastic American Indian Myths and Legends.
Originally I was just going to draw a few quick sketches and post them up along with a link to the text. Then I started having trouble drawing stars – thank you to those on twitter who heeded my pained cries. The stars in the story are living beings, so I wanted to draw them as such, rather than as big balls of gas. But how? I didn’t really ever figure that out, so when I wrote up my own version of the story I left the visuals out and decided instead to draw my own ideas together into one giant picture of the galaxy. Click on the final illustration to explore it close up. It’s quite large, as space should be, so I hope it loads okay and doesn’t reduce your monitor to smoke and exposed springs (which is what monitors are made of, right?).
Here’s Coyote Dances with the Stars.
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