7/31/23

Take a deep dive into Brian Lambert’s recently released book.

We’re thrilled to announce the publication of Plants to the Rescue, illustrated by Brian Lambert, published by Neon Squid.

Read our interview with Brian, below.

Brian Lambert

Brian says:

This book was published by Neon Squid who mainly publish STEM-focused books.

It was written by the wonderful Dr. Vikram Baliga, who uses his social media following to teach people about plants, science, and conservation efforts.

I loved working on this book! Plants are just plain fun to draw and color, so getting to do a whole book of them was a blast!

Plants to the Rescue,illustrated by Brian Lambert, published by Neon Squid.

Buy it here.

“From climate change to plastic pollution, this book explores real issues facing the planet and how plants can contribute to solutions.”

Q. What did you learn from doing this project?

A. I learned a whole lot about plants, which you can too if you read the book! I have a whole arsenal of nifty facts that I can trot out at fancy dinner parties now.

Q. What did you love about the theme?

A. The book is about how plants can be used to solve some of our planet’s biggest issues, from huge scale things like global climate change to much smaller things like how you can use a banana peel to help with sunburns and bug bites! Science! It’s just fun to learn about all these kinds of things!

Q. How do you come up with your sketches? Do you do research?

A. For this project the publisher provided me with a very thorough brief and a rough sketch layout that I basically used to just fill in the blanks. So, you can kind of imagine getting a page with a bunch of boxes drawn in to indicate buildings and some little stick figures here and there and then the text is also roughed in so I know where I need to leave open space.

The brief would also have a description of what they want. For the city page they told me they wanted a rooftop garden, a skybridge, and a building that uses hydroponics, etc.

Sometimes I did do a little extra research. For example, I watched some YouTube videos about modern and future construction techniques and what kind of buildings they expected to be able to build in the future so that I felt I was drawing buildings that were at least somewhat plausible.

Q. How do you decide on color palettes?

A. The AD really wanted bright vibrant colors. I also knew I was going to need a lot of different types of greens as this was a book about plants.

The base colors were from a color palette that Lilla Rogers had provided in a class, but I then expanded it.

For each color, I made a lighter version by adding a tinge of yellow, and a darker version by adding a little blue. I’ve found this makes the colors more interesting.

I ended up with an amazing palette that is extremely versatile.

Q. Were there challenges on this project?

A. The biggest challenge came about halfway through the project when I got appendicitis! The publisher was very understanding about giving me more time but it was hard not to feel stressed about getting everything done in time after that.