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Little Rat About the Story |
 Little Rat Sets Sail is the first of a series of stories about Little Rat. The second
is due out in the spring of 2004, and will be about learning to ride horseback, appropriately
called Little Rat Rides.
The series began as a project to help my daughter Monika earn money to pay her way through graduate school in social work, and as a way of putting her humorous, idiosyncratic style of telling stories onto paper. Since she is the writer in this series, I will let her tell about the writing in her own time, and will concentrate my own efforts on the pictures. For these illustrations, I decided to use the style that is easiest for me: drawing from reality, in pencil, with watercolor filling out the reality - all except for the Rat Family's fur, which is done with a mix of dust from both chalk and charcoal. Many years ago, when Monika was about three, she had a pet white rat named Sophie Rat. This time we bought a brown rat we named Rat, so I could be sure all the details in the illustrations would be correct. For example, Rat's forefeet have four rather long fingers but only a tiny almost vestigial thumb, which I'd never known before, and her tail has a few long hairs at the very tip, like tailtip whiskers. Soon after Rat arrived, she began rushing around in her aquarium, gathering the rags and straw around her in some sort of frenzy. The next morning, she was accompanied by three baby rats, only one of which, the brown one, survived for more than a couple of days. This became Little Rat. Her nose is shorter than her Mom's; her tail is shorter, too. One thing I noticed that the rats did, in addition to constant grooming of themselves and each other, is to drape their tails over each other, and hold their own tails. I used this to show Little Rat's uncertainty when her parents told her she was going to take sailing lessons. Momma and Little Rat moved around a lot, so I could draw them in all sorts of positions. But Rats moved a LOT, they never stayed still, so I could never finish a sketch of them. It was easy to draw them sleeping - which was most of the day, since rats are mostly night creatures - but then they curled up into a ball and hid their noses and eyes and feet, so there was nothing much to see. I got lazy and took lots of photographs. For most of my books, I've made a beginning sketch and then corrected in on good paper until it was "right". Sometimes I'd go through many, many pieces of good paper this way. With the Little Rat series, I made the drawing on cheaper paper, working directly from a photo, trace the parts I liked, then on the back of the tracing paper I would trace over these lines and transfer the part onto another piece of cheap paper and keep revising the rest, keep working until I liked more of it, and then finally transfer this onto good paper, paint it in, and then last of all draw in the dark, final lines in 5B or 6B pencil. From these books I have piles of tracing paper covered with the ghosts of half-finished pictures pencilled all over them. For the details of the pictures for Little Rat Sets Sail, I painted boats and beaches near our house on Cape Cod. for details of Little Rat Rides, I used the animals and buildings on the farm where Monika used to ride when she was little. The real Pee Wee is loping around somewhere in the skies now, and there are no photographs of him, so I used as my model, Salty, a Belgian draft horse whom I first go to know at age 56, when I myself began to learn to ride. I am still beginning to learn to ride now. The photograph of Starduster and Daddy Rat is from a real photo of Monika's real Dad riding the real Starduster in a real Fourth of July parade many, many years ago. I played with the photo on Photoshop so the original person became a rat, but the horse remained the same. The photo of Pee Wee sneezing is also Photoshopped, from a photograph of the real 10-year old Monika riding a horse named Happy, who was having a fit of sneezing at the Barnstable County Fair. Little Rat Sets Sail: ISBN 0-15-216297-6 Harcourt Copyright © 2001 by Molly Bang. Little Rat Rides: ISBN 0-15-204667-4 Harcourt Copyright © 2004 by Molly Bang. |