I have a brand new series that I’m starting, and it’s called Giants of Science, and these are individual books about famous scientists. They’re for a little older kids than I usually write for. They’re for grades, say, five to seven, and they’re more like chapter books, they’re not as heavily illustrated as my books usually are. They have black-and-white line drawings by a great artist named Boris Kulikov, who does these very quirky drawings. These are a little more advanced. They go into more depth than my other books. We started out with Leonardo da Vinci as a scientist, and there’s a lot of ways that you can look at Leonardo and think of him as our first scientist. He invented things, came up with concepts 500 years before a lot of other people did. He spent a lot of time dissecting bodies — corpses — and drawing these amazing drawings of what was going on inside the body.
We think of him as an artist, but actually, in his life, only completed 13 paintings. In fact, his art was a way for him to finance his science. He couldn’t figure out a way to get paid as a scientist. There wasn’t even a word for “scientist” back in Leonardo’s day, but by working as an artist, he could keep up with his science experiments. So, he was a fascinating guy, and I got to go in these books a lot more in depth than my other books, and I don’t have to be quite as concise and abbreviated.
