Help fund our Naturalist Numbers counting book

It’s time! After several years of stops and starts (a big move out to the country, wildfires, a nasty ice storm that wiped out several of our trees, the ongoing Covid craziness….), we finally got the second book done. It’s a counting book on the curious anatomical features of the animal world that often get ignored. Once again I worked in Scratchboard, but this time I added some Pen & Ink in token of the inspiration for this book; Victorian-era naturalist diaries that typically use a lot of pen & ink illustrations incorporated in the text. So each text page will have some old-fashioned drawrin’s up against the main image on the facing page which is in Scratchboard, colored in Photoshop. We had fun researching the land and sea creatures, looking for just the right interesting features. Sometimes it was a bit difficult, like the numbers 5 and 7 (what has 5 or 7 of something? Turns out the Sea Urchin has 5 teeth, and the California Flying Fish has 7 separate fins…). And sometimes it was fun turning typical expectations on their head, like the Octopus, for instance. EVERYONE always goes on about the tentacles, but how many people outside of oceanic biologists know that the Octopus has 3 hearts? And illustrating the 8 eyes on the Jumping Spider was a heck of a lot of fun. All those weird spider-hairs….

As for printing, this time around we’re going the self-publishing route, which is where everyone reading this comes in. We’ll have a link to Indiegogo once the campaign starts tomorrow and you can see what we’re doing. We’re excited, and we hope you will be too! Click HERE for the Indiegogo campaign. The fun starts today, October 12th, and lasts through October 28th. See you at Indiegogo!