This book, Animal Skeletons, was written by Judith Janda Presnall and published by Franklin Watts in 1995. It was a book I illustrated so early in my career that I didn’t yet know how to navigate the ins and outs of art direction when that direction didn’t include book specs. The publisher didn’t yet know what the dimensions of the book should be, nor was I given a page-by-page breakdown of the manuscript — I was left to decide the book’s entire logistics. So, that meant a lot of fumbling around and creating work around the proportions of the animals themselves. Thus, I have weird and irregular sizes of illustrations.
My former high school Biology teacher, Mr. Lawrence Strait, loaned me many of the skeleton mounts you’ll see in this book. He also had a baby shark in a tank of formaldehyde that I have no idea how I didn’t manage to break. Other reference like the snake and lizard skeletons was obtained from the local Nixon Park natural history museum in York PA.
Originally, I’d only created finished graphite drawings for the project but added color/paint to the drawings after I’d submitted the art. I used alkyd and oil paints on heavy weight paper, to achieve a smooth texture with meticulous detail.
A few years before this book, I bought a stereo-microscope to study insects for other projects. I was glad to have another opportunity to use it again here to observe the delicate features of subjects like insects.
Original art will be enveloped in an archival sleeve and shipped sandwiched between several layers of fome core and corrugated cardboard.
