One of the challenges I enjoyed about this book was capturing the immense difference in size between baby dinosaurs and their parents. I started the illustration process by sketching loose thumbnail sketches, exploring different compositions to convey the scale of dinosaurs.

Then I began refining these ideas into detailed drawings and final art.

Throughout the sketch process, I try to keep ideas fluid. In this case, I thought an aerial view of a parent next to 5 school buses would show the immense size of a mother Argentinosaurus. But I thought there might be even a better to way to show her scale. Then I calculated that a parent weighed as much as 17 elephants. I love drawing elephants, and thought the idea was better than the first.

Originally I sketched backgrounds around the dinosaurs. But the thing I wanted to emphasize the most with each illustration was life-like gestures of the dinosaurs. My editor, Deirdre, and my art director, Danica, suggested I try a white background around the art. I loved it!

The negative space also helped tie the layout of the book together. The book has a pattern of 2-page spreads. The first offers clues (or facts) that scientists have discovered. The second is a full spread conveying educated guesses about how baby dinosaurs and their parents behaved. Combining all these details worked with this layout.

I loved creating illustrations that demonstrated how dinosaurs must have behaved like animals alive today. The challenge was to tie illustrations of living animals with dinosaurs and show their similarities.

I chose poses that were reminiscent of things we’ve seen in the animal world. For example, a dinosaur nest seen from above, as if you were looking down into a bird’s nest.

The cover – that’s always the most fun! Here are just a few of the thumbnail sketches I drew to explore how to create it.

Dear Lita,

I am a school librarian at South Elementary in Jackson, Missouri. After the recent earthquake in Haiti, I used your book One Thousand Tracings for a text-to-world connection. The students were asked for ways they can help the people of Haiti just as the children after WWII helped the Germans. The students then cut out their footprints and signed each with their own way of helping the earthquake victims. Many brought money for the American Red Cross. This morning over $1200 was turned in to the Red Cross. Attached is the picture of the presentation.

Thanks for sharing and know others have benefited from this story.

WOW!! I’m still speechless. Congratulations to South Elementary for such an amazing effort!!

This book fills a lifelong dream to investigate paleontologists’ understanding of baby dinosaurs and their parents. It was an exciting book because scientists have made many great new discoveries of fossilized baby dinosaurs, nests, and eggs in recent years. I wrote and illustrated the book in a format with hypotheses about dinosaur behavior following clues to engage young readers in the scientific method.

Here’s an example of the format of the book. First we see some clues. These are things that are known about dinosaurs based on fossil evidence along with observations about animals, like crocodiles, that are alive today. (Click on any of the following images to see them larger.)

Then we see a hypothesis of possible dinosaur behavior.

Born to be Giants is a Junior Library Guild Selection and will also be available at Scholastic Book Fairs! The release data is April 27th.

Walter Rothschild was the son of Lord Rothschild, banker to Queen Victoria. He was incredibly rich and seemed like a kid who would have had everything, but he struggled with being horribly shy. His father demanded a lot of him — yet Walter was so nervous, he could barely speak. He seems like an unlikely hero, but a hero is just what he was to me. When he was 7 years old he declared to his parents he would build a museum. He set out to collect bugs, butterflies, birds, fish, reptiles, mammals and even plants. By the time he was a late teenager, he was funding expeditions all over the world to collect animals. This was in the late 1800’s when scientists still had not discovered many of the world’s plants and animals. Walter’s father discouraged his dreams and insisted he begin work at the family banking firm, but Walter persevered and opened his museum to the public when he was 24 years old. With the help of two curators and many explorers, Walter created the largest natural history collection ever gathered by one person and furthered our understanding of the world’s animals in immense ways. I’m really enjoying bringing his story to life!

You can see how the visit to the actual museum helped in creating some of the sketches:

I’m getting pretty close to finishing the final art for the illustrations so I wanted to post a sneak peek at a couple of the paintings:

]]> http://wpblog.litajudge.com/2009/11/30/strange-creatures/feed/ 2 http://wpblog.litajudge.com/2009/11/08/halloween-and-keene/ http://wpblog.litajudge.com/2009/11/08/halloween-and-keene/#comments Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:23:01 +0000 Lita Judge http://wpblog.litajudge.com/?p=959 I probably should have known that giving a talk on Halloween was asking for trouble. But I didn’t expect the lights and power to go off halfway through my talk at the Keene State Children’s lit conference.  That was a new experience. Standing in front of 550 people, everything was going terrifically for the first 20 minutes, then BLACK! It turned out a squirrel had gotten into a transformer and blew all the electricity throughout the campus. Jane Yolen stepped up like a seasoned conference trooper and suggested we break up into small groups in different areas of the auditorium, so that the attendees could speak personally with each of the presenters (Lois Lowry, Katherine Paterson, me, and this year’s Caldecott winner, New Hampshire artist Beth Krommes.) That turned nightmare into a fun experience for all. Eventually a battery powered mic was located and Jane started her talk since I relied on power point to show visuals. After Jane, the power came back. Ah. I finished my hour-long talk. Surprisingly, it all came together seamlessly!

Time has flown by and I’m sorry to be behind on my blog entries. I’m half way through final art of my next book, which is always consuming. And the weather up here in New England has been exceptional this fall, so when not up to my ears in drawings and paintings, I crave to be outside, soaking up the last of the fall sun. This year we had a special treat, savoring autumn’s beauty with my editor Namrata and her husband Quinn. They came up from the city and we reveled in everything fitting for the season — hikes in fall color, hot apple cider and books by the fire, guitar and banjo music with friends, toasted S’mores, and even pumpkin carving! What fun we had with them. We even fit a little time for work over a book.

Nami and me by the river — my favorite spot to think about books and ideas.

Quinn is a talented musician, but somewhat unschooled at traditional New England pumpkin carving. He chose to create with a jigsaw.

It’s starting to feel more like winter these days. And as the days get colder, the wildlife comes in closer to select goodies from the yard.

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