From the promotional copy of Born To Be Wild: Baby Mammals and Their Parents by Lita Judge (Roaring Brook, 2014):
What do grizzly bear cubs eat? Where do baby raccoons sleep? And how does a baby otter learn to swim?
Every baby mammal, from a tiny harvest mouse “pinky” to a fierce lion cub, needs food, shelter, love, and a family.
Filled with illustrations of some of the most adorable babies in the kingdom, this awww-inspiring book looks at the traits that all baby mammals share and proves that, even though they’re born in the wild, they’re not so very different from us, after all!
What was your initial inspiration for creating this book?
I wanted to show the amazing ways in which animals protect and raise their young and how remarkably similar a baby animals needs are to our own.
When I was a little girl, I watched my grandparents raise Golden Eagles and Great Horned Owl chicks. We played foster parent to Green Herons, Red Tailed hawks, raccoons, otters and any other animal that was orphaned or injured.
My grandparents were biologists, and they taught me to respect animals and to study how they live and interact in the wild. My work reflects my upbringing, and the fact that I’ve always felt compelled to bring a better understanding of animals to young readers.
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| Lita with a Great Horned Owlet |
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| Lita’s grandmother, Fran Hamerstrom, with a Golden Eagle |
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| Lita’s grandmother, Fran Hamerstrom, with a Golden Eagle |
What was the timeline between spark and publication?
This book went fairly quickly as far as my picture books go.
When I say quickly, I mean three years. That’s how long it takes me to build up the text and sketches after I have an initial concept in mind.
The initial sketching is always the most time consuming for me. When I illustrate wild animals, I want to reflect not only how they look, but how they move and relate to each other.
That means I actually do hundreds of sketches of animals from life, videos, and pictures before choosing a gesture that I feel says what I’m trying to convey.
Final art is a mere three months or so after the months and months of drawing and playing around with text. And then there is that year-plus time at the end where you are done but have to wait for release.
What were the greatest triumphs and challenges along the way?
For this book, I wanted to show the topic of baby animals in a universal way, depicting not only the needs that all baby animals have, but also showing the connection between our own needs when we are young to theirs.
This meant I had to do a very broad approach and choose the animals to illustrate each point carefully. For every animal that you see in the final book, there are dozens more on the cutting room floor. Taking out a detail, whether it be text or drawing, that you love is always the hardest part for me, but in the end, you find the best way to depict the topic.
What was your connection to the topic?
I have spent most of my life observing and drawing animals. Whether in zoos, or in the wilderness, I carry a sketchbook, binoculars, and camera with me always, recording what I see.
I’ve always been fascinated particularly with baby animals, their playfulness and open expressions.
How did you go about your research process?
Research for a nonfiction book is always an intense and joyful part of my creative process.
For a book on animals, I rely on a lifetime of watching, drawing, and photographing animals. I chose many of the animals in this book particularly because I had spent time observing them in nature.
If it’s an animal I can’t observe easily in nature, I can often go to zoos to draw them, observing not only their appearance, but how they move. Wildlife videos are also a great help for this.
My parents are wildlife photographers and have built up an amazing reference library of photographs over the years.
There is always a lot of reading about animals that goes into a project like this, but the most important thing for me to be able to capture the expressions and likeness of an animal is to spend a lot of time observing and drawing them.
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| Lita with her grandfather |
How did you approach the art?
For me, drawing animals really comes down to capturing its gesture or body movement and expression. I don’t want my readers to just know what a chimpanzee of meerkat looks like; I want them to feel a connection to them. I want them to look into the faces of my animals and feel like there is an animal looking back at them.
I also want them to get an understanding of the intimate world of animals within their own world; how does a mother panda hold her baby, or a baby orangutan curl up and feel safe with its parent.
To capture all this I first do hundreds of very loose sketches, focusing on body language long before I worry about details.
Once I feel like I’ve captured that intimate portrait between the animals, I start focusing on the details, which describe their faces and bodies.
Slowly my drawings become more refined until at last, they are ready for a light watercolor wash at the end.
Looking back on your career, how have you grown and changed as a writer and artist?
I started writing only nonfiction but have grown to love creating both fiction and nonfiction stories.
I think my background as a geologist, and having grown up helping my grandparents with their research projects in the field, made me very comfortable with the research involved with creating nonfiction.
But the more I drew and wrote, the more I began to want to push myself into creating fictional characters that emoted expressions full of exuberance and whimsy.
I think my background with wildlife made my fictional drawings of animals better because they were rooted in an understanding for anatomy and how animals move.
And I think my work with fictional characters made my nonfiction better because it really helped me focus on building connections between my readers and my subject through studying the subtlety of expressions.
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| Good Morning to Me!, to be released spring 2015 |
What advice do you have for budding author-illustrators?
Focus on our craft. Put your emphasis there more than worrying about how, when, and where to get published. I see so many people that are very eager to get published; they really put a lot of energy into trying to make connections or getting published before they’ve had a chance to let their work blossom into a unique voice. There will be time for all that, but until then, draw, write, draw, write, draw, write…. until you have stories dancing out of your mind!
Is there anything you’d like to add?
Just that I’m really thankful to get to do the work I love. And thankful to the muses that keep me inspired by all their delightful expressions and loving companionship!
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