Hidden Planet: Secrets of the Animal Kingdom

Hidden Planet: Secrets of the Animal Kingdom — page 3
INTRODUCTION I've always described myself as a frustrated naturalist trapped in an illustrator's body I grew up wanting to be a mixture of TV presenter David Attenborough and fictional adventurer Indiana Jones and eventually settled on illustration as a way of bringing my childhood fantasies to life Now I explore the natural world through drawing and writing but it's not enough for me to produce a technically accurate picture of an animal I also need to understand what's happening beneath the fur and the feathers I spent my early years travelling back and forth between the United Kingdom and southern Africa I learned to swim in a mountain river and one of my earliest memories is of being driven across the endless red dunes of the Namib Desert on my sixth birthday As a child I was never without an encyclopedia When wasn't reading about animals or drawing them I was marvelling at anything I could find from chameleons to crickets and everything in between and trying to understand it all 6