Three squirrels and a bird

Three squirrels and a bird is not the title but the topic of the story that I'm going to make the book about.  There are a couple of reasons I chose this story.  1)  It's one that Maria asks for frequently 2) There are no humans in the story to illustrate 3)  It takes place in the fall, right now, so I can gather materials for the illustrations.  So a little bit about illustrations.  I'm not good at realistic drawing, painting, etc. and so creating illustrations to satisfy me I know will be the biggest challenge.  I've decided to try and create collages of photographs to make the picture look interesting and complex and true to life.  I have a couple sources of inspiration already.  My Dad gave Maria a "FotoFable" titled Tedric the House Mouse by Peter Johannes which is a story set to photographs of a real mouse and his surroundings.  Here's a picture of one page of the book and also the website of the book.
Tedric the House Mouse

The first couple of years I taught science I became interested in nature journaling as a way to incorporate observation, inference, writing and illustration into my classroom.  Through a  workshop I was introduced to a book called The Private Eye:  "5X" Looking/Thinking by Analogy-A Guide to Developing the Interdisciplinary Mind by Kerry Ruef.  I know the title sounds long and complicated but it has great activities for observing nature using a 5X jeweler's loupe and talks about how drawing something as you analyze it can make you see things on a whole different level or see things you've never noticed before.  I haven't been able to use it in my classroom as much as I'd like but I have personally enjoyed nature journaling myself and would like to incorporate some aspects of it into the illustrations.  Here's a link to that book The Private Eye

Over the beautiful Columbus Day weekend I was out with my camera taking pictures of everything and anything I thought I might want to use in the book.  Mostly I worked around the yard but also got some pictures on our yearly Columbus Day hike.  Of course Maria loves a project and was very busy picking up things for me to photograph or taking the camera herself to snap shots of things she found interesting. The scenery is beautiful and easy to capture, pictures of squirrels and birds will be a challenge.

Another thing I did this weekend was to write out the story so that it's not just floating around in my head.  I like the physical act of writing with a pen and paper and if I'm going to edit something for grammar or move ideas around I like to be able to draw circles and arrows and other editing marks.  My mind can follow all of those marks and process the changes whereas if it's on a computer screen I can't see what I started with and how I changed things.

My next task is to get an idea of where page breaks will fall within the story and what I want to depict in the illustrations.