After many science adventures and all those TV shows and all those TV plots 52 different science explorations we started to think that it might be fun to take Ms. Frizzle in a different direction and go into the study of cultures and world history. So we thought, “What if she breaks the mold a little bit and doesn’t go with the school bus, but she’s taking off from school, and she’s going off on a vacation, and she has her own adventures?” We did this because we wanted to try to make it not confusing with the science series in many ways.
Another thing we did was to give it a 9-by-12 vertical size to make it different from the horizontal size of the science books, and I changed the style of painting. All the original science books are in watercolor with a pen-and-ink line. Watercolor is a transparent, washy color. For the social studies series that we’re doing, I’m using something called gouache. Gouache is like poster paint that you had in elementary school. See? I’m back in elementary school. That’s what I used for all my sixth-grade paintings. It’s opaque. It’s thick. It’s very bright, flat color; and so it has a whole different look.
