It’s not often that real live models insist on visiting people visualising them for the sake of a book but that is what happened when I was busy illustrating a story about a dung beetle using the usual 2D source material for reference. The story is a (lyrical?) exposition of the extraordinary discovery that dung beetles navigate using the stars.
“Look what I found at your front gate,” a friend said, tipping a real life dung beetle onto my work space. Pong – for that is the name of the character in my book, its title and by instant association, the visitor – went into tortoise mode, hiding under his shiny black carapace.
What brought Pong to our gate, I wondered? Was it my lucky stars? Had to be.
Here is Pong, the book and Pong, the visitor and model. ( Yes, I set him free two days later leaving him outside the gate to carry on to where he might have been heading.)
