Book Giveaway!

While I have been the lucky recipient of several lovely items from giveaways on other blogs, I have never held a contest of my own. It's time! The prize? A copy of the children's book, Katie of the Sonoran Desert, written by Kate Jackson and illustrated by moi.

Here are the rules. The contest is open to people living in Canada and the US (if you are one of my Sri Lankan friends, please forgive me but Canada Post gouges us beyond belief for international mail! But I can bring you copies when we visit SL again.) To qualify, you just have to leave a comment telling me something good about snakes, or about an encounter you had with a snake that didn't end in its death! I will put all the entries in a bag and let the Hubster draw the winner. Make sure you leave your blog address or email so that I can actually contact you if you win. The contest closes at midnight EST on Saturday, August 22nd, which gives you a whole week to come up with something. One entry per person please! The winner will have the book mailed to them and if you want it signed, you can let me know.

I worked on the illustrations for this book over a period of about 3-1/2 years, on and off. While I studied life drawing for two years while doing my graphic design studies, drawing people has always been more difficult and less fun for me than drawing animals. But in Katie, I had to do several illustrations of the main human characters, a pair of herpetologists named Kate and Roger. Often, I made my husband stand in for them and pose while I took photos for reference.

This has resulted in some odd shots popping up in my iPhoto library, like this:

Gordon was holding a garbage bag to simulate Kate holding a snake bag. In particular, I wanted a good reference picture of the hand holding the bag. The real-life Kate doesn't collect snakes in trash bags, however. She has a collection of fabric bags custom-sewn for her by her grandmother!

Another challenge was to figure out what a herpetologist's limbs would look like when holding a radio-tracking antenna. So my willing assistant struck this non-Vogue pose:

As it turned out, there was no holding of the earpiece to ear in real life snake-tracking, so I ended up using only Gordon's right arm for reference. I made it more feminine and considerably less hairy, and voilà, it became the arm of Kate the herpetologist.

If you want to read more about the real-life Kate, author of the book, check out this page , then read her adult non-fiction book about her Congo expedition, Mean and Lowly Creatures: Snakes Science and Survival in the Congo.

So get going with the snake comments, and next week we'll pick our lucky winner. And if you just want to BUY a copy, there are links on the right side of my blog showing where you can purchase one! The book still doesn't have a distributor in Canada, so feel free to nag your bookstore to stock it. We're working on this. Also feel free to ask your library to buy a copy!