It was my great pleasure to have a chance to work with eminent entomologist May Berenbaum last year. May has a new book out called The Earwig’s Tail. It is an A-Z bestiary of insect myths that May dispatches with a great deal of wit. I was lucky enough to be asked to do the illustrations. The publisher used two of my illustrations on the cover.
I tried to do the illustrations in the style of a Medieval Bestiary. You can judge how successful I was. Here is the original illustration featuring the earwig (it’s teeny tiny of the cover).
For those interested in the process, I would read May’s essay and then generate 2-7 rough sketches and post them on my website for her to consider. She would tell me which one she liked and I would ink it. On a few occassions it was “none of the above” and I would head by to the drawing board. Follow this link to see the seven rough sketches I did for the Headless Cockroach essay. The final illustration is below.
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Jay, you are absolutely brilliant! I was the lucky one to have an opportunity to work with you–you captured the comic sensibilities to perfection!
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Thanks, May! It was a lot of fun.
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Jay, I love this blog about science comics, and will highlight it in a future post on my new blog, Science + Story. I have a hand in science comics myself now, working on the World of Viruses series.
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Hi Ann
We can always use more good science comics! I haven’t heard of the World of Viruses series but I’ll definitely go looking for it. -
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