We all know kids love stories, but there’s something else they’re particular about, too: truth and correctness. Kids are naturally proud of the knowledge they’ve acquired and this can be especially true about nature and animal facts.

In this post, Lisa Dalrymple and Suzanne Del Rizzo, the author/illustrator duo behind Skink on the Brink—a story with about a little skink who loses his footing when his beautiful blue tail turns grey—take turns explaining how they approached the balance of fact and fiction for their book. Stewie the skink is both a lizard who runs though the forest making up rhymes (fiction) and a lizard living in an accurately depicted Carolinian forest—the preferred habitat of certain populations of Common Five-lined Skink.

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Lisa Dalrymple:

I think kids—and grown-ups—love fictional stories, and they love learning facts and reading non-fiction books, too. (My six-year-old always makes sure we visit both the picture book story section and the non-fiction aisles during our weekly library visits.) When you want to curl up inside a story, you want to read a story–something where the characters, their dreams and their challenges, matter to you. Stewie’s story had to be about what happened to him, about his feelings and responses as he was changing, quite dramatically, into a full-grown skink.

That being said, if Skink on the Brink were going to bring a relatively unknown species into focus, it could also accurately reflect its habits and habitat so that readers, in engaging with Stewie’s story, might also absorb an accurate understanding of skinks in Canada.

So I did a lot of research–a LOT of research—and I talked to a lot of people at the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources who had done even more research. Then, when I felt that I had the necessary background material for a story that featured a skink, that’s where I tried to keep that information—in the background. 

For example, in a picture book, where every word has to count, it didn’t matter that Stewie was pounced upon by “a short-tailed weasel, otherwise known in North America as an ermine.” What did matter for the story was how that encounter impacted Stewie as a character.

I think kids enjoy learning and love it when books and grown-ups respect that. I don’t get this idea where we treat non-fictional information as the disliked vegetable that needs to be disguised under a layer of cheese before thinking kids will consume it. Some kids—lots of kids—like vegetables.

Suzanne Del Rizzo:

Since Skink on the Brink would be a “Tell-me-More” storybook containing a non-fiction component within the “back matter,” I knew that I wanted to incorporate lots of biological accuracy within my plasticine illustrations; I felt these would best harmonize with Lisa’s super story.
 
Really, it was the perfect project for me, considering I have a science degree—biological research was right up my alley. After all, kids are very smart and they ask fantastic questions. I have four little inquisitors of my own and they pick up on the littlest details. This fun story would also serve as a possible jumping off point for further discussions on endangered species, life cycles, and natural habitats.

I knew early on that I wanted my plasticine illustrations to celebrate Stewie in his natural habitat with the appropriate foliage and wildlife, in all their fabulous textures and colours.

Before I began sketching, I pored over Common Five-lined Skink information and reference photos. I knew I’d need to address two important issues: (1) find a way to accurately depict Stewie’s relative growth, since not many of us have seen a Common Five-lined Skink, and (2) keep Stewie recognizable throughout the book, even as his colouration continued to change from page to page. (At the beginning of the story, Stewie is a young skink who displays the juvenile colouration—a very distinct black body and striking blue tail—but as the book progresses he changes and grows into an adult skink that has a grey adult colouration.

To ensure I had his physical characteristics down pat, I sculpted a maquette of Stewie, a little sculpture in polymer clay, which I could rotate and move around to help me capture his facial expressions and maintain proportions. That way he’d “always be Stewie whether red, grey or blue-y” (Lisa, I couldn’t resist!). One way I solved the relative size issue was by incorporating familiar animals and plants into the illustrations and, to show his physical growth throughout the book, I introduced a secondary character, a little White-footed Deer Mouse that follows Stewie throughout the story and acts as a constant size reference.

I think Skink on the Brink offers the perfect blend of a relatable and lovable growing-up-can-be-hard story mixed with a sprinkling of non-fictional elements. I hope it not only piques readers’ interest in finding out more about Ontario’s only lizard, but also leaves them wanting to do a little outdoor exploration of their own. Wouldn’t it be amazing if a child spotted a Common Five-lined Skink, Red-tailed Hawk or Great Blue Heron, and said “Hey, I saw one of those in Skink on the Brink!”?