I have a new book coming out at the end of August. I wanted to take a minute to walk through what the book is about and share how we (me and the amazing RISE team) brought it to life.
This is the second non-fiction book I’ve written in this series, and if you had not guessed from the title and image, it is about our neighbour—the Moon.
Before we begin, let’s just remind ourselves of the Moon. Sometimes you forget, right? That we’re on a big rock, and there’s another slightly less big rock just out there. These are some photos from NASA’s Apollo albums on Flickr, which are well worth looking through and boggling your mind.
And for some scale, here is the size and distance of Earth and Moon. Crazy to think about all the space between the two.
Anyway, back to the book.
Because we had already made When Cloud Became A Cloud, there was a template for us to follow for this one. Cloud had about 10 chapters, and we floated along with her through the whole water cycle.
So that seems straightforward, right? Write about how Moon was formed, a bit about lunar cycles, and then we’re done! As with every creative project, it wasn’t exactly that easy..! The scientific concepts were a lot more complicated, and there were recently discovered insights about the formation of Moon we had to research and get right.
Once the manuscript was finished, the text had to be reworked to fit each page, ensuring it made sense, flowed smoothly, was funny/scientific/engaging in the right places, and matched up to the sketches. This process is called pagination, and I could write a whole post about it, but I’ll spare you for now. We got it done!
In the finished text, we explore various topics such as craters, orbits, Sun's light, the lunar cycle, human visitors, and the influence of Moon on tides. Phew! It's a lot to cram into one small book.
A massive thank you to my brilliant editor, Nicole, who watched way more science videos than she was probably expecting to. Same with Maria, who designs these books. We also had a NASA science communicator review the text and provide us with invaluable pointers.
It really is the greatest pleasure to get to research and write these books, and to spend so much time immersed in topics that most people are too busy to think about once they ✨grow up✨. I got to think about the Moon pretty much every day for a year, how wild is that?
After the text is laid out, it's time to jump into the art, which is a nice opportunity to engage your brain in a different way. For every book I do, I try to approach the art in a way that is specific to that project.
For Moon, there were two distinct ‘looks’ I wanted to figure out.
First, when she is newly formed, made of molten rock.
And, secondly, when she has cooled down and is the familiar grey we know and love.
For molten Moon, I wanted to try and show how she was made up of these different rocks that had smushed together. There is a sequence where the rocks come together to form Moon, and I’m really pleased with it. I used layers of bleeding ink overlapped, which I think kind of gives the impression of a ball of plasticine that has been rolled together with different colours.
Then, for cool Moon, I wanted to show the familiar craters we see, but also give an impression of something mysterious and inky on her surface.
I used a combination of a woodcut print for the craters, and then ink with salt crystals for the other texture. The salt crystals suck the ink up, giving a quality like tiny impacts and remains of molten lava flows. I think so anyway.
There is a load more stuff to say about the making of this book (how we approached the phases of the Moon could be a whole post!), but I think I’ll leave it there for now and end on some more images from the book.
When Moon Became The Moon comes out August 29th. If you didn’t know, NASA’s Artemis mission will be sending real human people back to the Moon next year. I can’t wait for everyone to look up and dream about her then, just like I’ve been doing.
Thanks for reading!
Sooo cute!!!! Looks awesome Rob loved seeing the process
Love this!