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DAILY HAMPSHIRE GAZETTE APRIL 19, 2001 Amelia Lincoln photos
Growing up in St. Louis, Mo., Bob Marstall turned to the Boy Scouts to get the dose of nature he craved. Despite the shortage of flora and fauna in his city neighborhood, he had found a pond in a park near his home and he enjoyed spending his time clomping around in it, investigating its muck.
The Scouts, however, offered hikes and camping trips that provided him the chance to explore the foothills of the Ozark Mountains.
"We went to incredible places," he says. "My favorite thing to go off in the woods by myself and look at things. I'd always be dragging things home from ponds, much to my parents' dismay."
Marstall loved to draw his discoveries. And he devoured both the drawings and text in nature books by authors Holling C. Holling and Jean Craighead George. His favorite book was by Holling. Called "Minn of the Mississippi," it was a story about a turtle's life journey from the headwaters of the Mississippi, where it hatched, to New Orleans, La., where it arrived as a full-grown snapping turtle.
Marstall loved to
study the dozens of thumbnail sketches that lined the margins of the book. And
he loved the whole notion of the turtle's journey, so much so he's picked the
concept up in his own work, which combines his love of nature, drawing and children's
literature.
THE JOURNEY BOOKS
Marstall, who lives in Northampton, now illustrates children's picture books with colorful, detailed and scientifically correct watercolor or oil paintings, and his most popular book to date, "An Extraordinary Life: The Story of a Monarch Butterfly," is the first of what he calls his "journey" books. It's a story about a monarch butterfly's travels from a hayfield in Shelburne to its wintering grounds in central Mexico.
"A Dragon in the Sky: The Story of a Green Darner Dragonfly," Marstall's latest collaboration with author Laurence Pringle, was published this month. At right is the photograph Marstall used to help him draw the cover; the original work is at the top of the photo.
A companion book, "A Dragon in the Sky: The Story
of a Green Darner Dragonfly," came out this month. It details the journey
of a dragonfly from a swamp in western New York to a pond in Florida.
Even as that book hit the stores, Marstall was midway through a new book, "Crows: Strange and Wonderful," which will publish in 2002.
HIS NATURAL ENVIRONMENT
Marstall works out of a high-ceilinged, 600-square foot studio in the
Arts & Industry Building in Florence. It seems as if every square inch of
space inside - walls, floors, shelves and cupboards - is filled up with specimens
ranging from a cow's skull he found in Ashfield, which is mounted on one wall,
to miniature wooden sculptures of turtles and bears and other creatures from the
wild.
A large self-portrait from 10 years ago hangs on a back wall. Plants,
magazine clippings and shelves full of his books dot the room, and framed original
artwork from his books hangs on the walls of the narrow hallway that leads to
his work space. On the floor near his computer desk are a pair of hiking boots
and a pair of sneakers.
These objects are immediate clues that Marstall has an active mind and a passion
for his work.
But it is the breezy and bustling way he moves around his studio to put his hands
on this clipping or that drawing that shows he is truly an illustrator at heart.
Marstall can't sit still and tell a story. He needs to also present his listeners
with something tangible to underscore his points.
When he's drawing, Marstall sits at an oversized easel. Since he's now working on the book about crows, the easel is covered with images of the birds that he's cut from magazines, taken from the Internet or copied from a library book. His paints and brushes are to his right, and a plethora of resource materials are organized in file folders to his left. Above him is his stress releaser: a trapeze that's hung on a turnbuckle. When he's been sitting too long, he hangs from it, stretches and spins.
But Marstall's work is not confined to his studio. He's an
avid researcher who's apt to be found trooping through fields and slogging through
marshes, capturing or photographing specimens.
Fred Morrison, a science teacher at the John F. Kennedy Middle School in Northampton, served as a consultant on the butterfly and dragonfly books, offering help in the research.
Morrison would capture specimens and hold them as Marstall took close-up photographs, to be used later as a basis for his pencil sketches. An illustration on Page 53 of "A Dragon in the Sky" - which appears to show a dragonfly in flight pursuing an insect - was drawn from such a photograph.
"What you don't see are Fred's fingers," Marstall says as he dashes
across the room, pulls open a portfolio drawer and searches until he finds the
photograph. Sure enough, there are the fingers holding the creature by its wings.
For the dragonfly book, Marstall spent many hours at Fitzgerald Lake in Northampton, fishing out dragonfly eggs, protonymphs - the insect's form as it hatches - and nymphs, which he would then raise in his studio, drawing them as they developed. Sketches of the various phases of the creature are found on Page 15 of the book.
For a drawing on Page 26, Marstall used intricate scientific measures. He wanted to draw in detail the hinged jaw, which opens, grabs its prey and clamps shut in about one-20,000th of a second. Because photographing a live specimen would never prove feasible, he waited until a specimen died, used tweezers to open the jaw, and then observed the creature through the lens of a microscope, drawing all the while. He was able to view the jaw with enough accuracy to offer an extremely detailed and labeled drawing.
Most times, though, Marstall does not draw exactly what he
sees in a photograph or magazine clipping. He combines elements - using this crow's
beak and that one's body position, for instance.
Once he has a rough pencil sketch, technology enters in.
Marstall scans the image into his computer and then manipulates it in Photoshop, a software program that allows users to make design changes to a graphic. He can add images to the background or foreground. He can reverse the image he's drawn. He can add contrast or gradation of color. In the past, if Marstall didn't like a sketch, his only option was to redraw it.
"Now I can scan it in and mess with it. The fun part is making them come
alive," he says. "I play with them in Photoshop and clean them up and
do different things.
"I've just gradually used it more and more with each
book. At this point, it's an invaluable tool."
Marstall's final images, however, are not printouts from a Photoshop file. They
are meticulous oil or watercolor paintings based on the printouts, and they are
mesmerizing in their use of color, with illustrations in the monarch book standing
out as particularly brilliant and detailed.
Employing a bit of artistic license, Marstall often uses local landscapes as backdrops
for his creatures. In "Crows," for instance, the Meadows in Northampton
served as the model for the illustration on Pages 16 and 17. The view is looking
south toward Mount Tom, and Marstall says, "I took out the towers, of course,
for aesthetic reasons." He also added a few trees.
Marstall came to this area after studying painting at Webster College in Webster Groves, Mo., and entered the University of Massachusetts as a full-time graduate student studying film and television production. He studied for a year, did some research work on audiovisual equipment for the Northeast Regional Media Center for the Deaf, and from 1972 to 1973, he worked as a photographer at a school for the deaf in Connecticut.
Then he abandoned the communications work. He began teaching art part time at schools around the region, and he started illustrating on a free-lance basis. Marstall designed the sign that once hung at Beardsley's restaurant in downtown Northampton. He did logos, menus and children's book jackets for publishing companies, using local children as models for books by famous authors such as Beverly Cleary.
By coincidence, his first professional jacket with Harper & Row was for the book "The Talking Earth" by one of his favorite childhood authors, Jean Craighead George. After illustrating a second book for George, at her request, Marstall got to meet the woman whose work he says was "crucial to his life."
Then, in the early 1990s, he gave an editor from MacMillan a rendering of sitka
spruce roots. That work ended up in the hands of another editor who was toying
with the idea of producing a children's book on the regeneration of a forest after
fire strikes.
The editor liked Marstall's work, and he was hired to illustrate "Fire in the Forest: A Cycle of Growth and Renewal," written by Laurence Pringle. Marstall and Pringle developed a friendship and mutual respect while working on the book. But Marstall's wife passed away during this period and it would be two years before the men would collaborate on a second book. "For a long time, I wasn't very productive," says Marstall. Ultimately, they would join forces on the butterfly, dragonfly and crow books.
ENJOYING SUCCESS
"An Extraordinary Life: The Story of a Monarch Butterfly," published in 1997 by Orchard Books, has won numerous awards, but the one Marstall is most proud of is the Orbis Pictus Award for nonfiction, which came in 1998 from the National Council of Teachers of English. Securing this distinction made Marstall the first artist to share the award with an author.
Marstall is enjoying the success of the book - all of his books really; he has illustrated seven. One he did 15 years ago, "The Lady and the Spider" was chosen as a Reading Rainbow book by the children's television program of the same name and has sold over 200,000 copies.
Marstall tours all over the country, lecturing in schools on the integration of art and science and showing slides of his work. And he and Pringle are finalists for a National Science Foundation Artists' and Writers' Program grant to research a book about Weddell seals in Antarctica in 2002.
He says he hopes that in the future he will be able to produce a book a year and combine that work with the lecturing and touring. "I'm building a niche in this area," he says. "Things are really starting to open up now."
"It's perfect for me," he adds. "It's like a fantasy. It's what
I would be doing in my free time anyway."
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