Picture Books from Nature

We wrote picture books today! Lindsay Barrett George, author and illustrator of many wonderful nature books, walked us through the process of making a picture book. We worked in groups to create maps of a habitat; each of us adopted an animal that is found in that habitat and wrote a book about a day in the life of that animal. I ended up being a caddisfly larvae and I got eaten by a frog. I found this exercise very illuminating two years ago; in fact, it really helped me with the pacing of Wolfsnail: A Backyard Predator. This exercise really brings home the fact that writing a manuscript is a very different thing from creating a page-turning art object. Lindsay taught me that as an author/illustrator, I actually had three jobs: writer, illustrator, and designer.

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