This is Part 3 of my three-part interview with Contributing Editor David Allen Sibley, author of The Sibley Guide to Birds, about his new book, The Sibley Guide to Trees.
In Part 1, Sibley explains how long it took to produce The Sibley Guide to Trees, where the idea of doing a tree guide came from, why he decided against doing another guide to birds, why he feels there's room for him to make a real contribution to tree identification, and, surprisingly, why he doesn't consider himself an expert on trees. Go to Part 1.
In Part 2, Sibley tells why there are few paintings of whole trees (and no botanical keys) in his new book; he describes why readers of the tree guide should be able to use it the same way a birdwatcher uses the bird guide; and he characterizes the reaction the tree book has received from his close birding friends. Go to Part 2. --C.H.
Could you tell me about the work involved to produce a book such as this?
This book was very different from the bird guide. For the bird guide, I spent more than a decade traveling around doing research and then started working on the book. For the tree guide, I started out seven years ago trying to come up with a list of species and plan out some of the pages, figure out what I wanted to illustrate and what would be left out. It took a couple a years before I started to zero in on a design and a list of species. At the same time, I decided to use acrylic paint instead of the opaque watercolors that I had used in the bird guide.
Why did you make that decision?
With the gouache, the opaque watercolor that I used for painting birds, I had always had a really hard time getting good shades of green. With the acrylics, it’s much easier to get nice, bright greens of all different shades, from yellow-green to blue-green, dark or light. It’s easy to adjust the colors, to make it slightly bluer or slightly yellower, if you’ve finished the painting and the color is not quite right, and the colors are nice and bright and clear. All that was really difficult with gouache. The texture of the leaf also, that sort of smooth, satiny, slightly glossy texture that most leaves have, that also was really difficult to do with gouache at the same time that you’re controlling or modifying the color. I decided to try out acrylics, and it was the right choice. It was much, much easier and made the paintings go a lot faster.
So the first two years of the project were spent planning and doing research. I did some traveling -- a few trips to the West Coast and to the Southeast to see some of the species that I wasn’t familiar with -- but spent a lot time here around Boston, going to the Arnold Arboretum and Mount Auburn Cemetery, which are both great birding spots but also incredible collections of trees. I could see several hundred species of trees right here in Boston.
Were you sketching in the field, were you taking photographs, were you snipping off bits of trees and bringing them home? Did you work from specimens when you worked on the bird book?
For the bird book, I did basically no work directly from specimens. I did all the bird guide from photographs, but all based on my own sketches and field experience and using photographs as my main reference material in the studio.
For the trees, I did some field sketching, and I did some field painting. A few of the paintings in the book were actually done in the woods sitting on a stool looking at an individual tree. Which I, that’s not possible with birds really. I don’t work that way anyway. [Laughs] But with trees, I could really pick out an individual tree and park myself in the woods and just spend a couple of hours working on a painting.
That kind of experience is really critical to develop my style of painting and drawing and learn about the trees. At the same time, I did a lot of photography myself. With my research trips, I was taking hundreds of photographs of all the trees I was finding. It’s a lazy way -- if I had 10 years, I would have preferred to do all sketching, but because of time constraints, I decided to go with photography.
Once I had worked out the painting style and gotten to know trees well enough so that I could interpret the photographs, then I could work in the studio, using my own photographs and searching Google and a few really good reference books and CDs of collections of tree photographs. At that point, I could just sit in the studio and find a bunch of pictures and do paintings from that.
Were these digital images, most of them or all of them?
I would say three-quarters of my reference material was digital, if I had to guess. All of my own photographs were digital, of course, and most of the reference material that I was using was either on the Internet or on Woody Plants in North America, a really good CD-ROM of North American trees. It’s a complete, nearly complete, guide to North American trees with photographs of bark and fruit and twigs and flowers and leaves, all the same things that I was illustrating. It was a tremendous resource for reference material.
Do I understand that you work at home?
Yeah, I have a room here in the house that I use for my studio.
Is there a routine that you follow when you work on a huge project like this? Do your days fall into a certain order?
Mostly, the order is provided by the kids’ school schedule. The kids go to school, and I go to work. The bulk of my work time was just while the kids were at school. And I of course grab other time. I work for a couple more hours in the afternoon. And as the project went on, as the deadline loomed and the work wasn’t keeping up, I started working more and more nights and weekends. The last year, really, was just a tremendous amount of work.
I remember reading that Roger Tory Peterson once described working on field guides later in his career as a kind of a prison. Have you ever had a thought like that?
I’ve heard that quote. I could see that. He did so many field guides.
The bird guide was really a pleasure because I had spent so much time in the field. As I did the book, it was really reliving all that field experience and learning new things about birds as I went through all my field notes and painted the illustrations.
The tree guide was a really different experience because I didn’t have the luxury of 10 years of field work before I started it. I was learning every day as I went, but at the same time, I had to produce the paintings. I would sit down in the morning and study a species and learn about it and start working on the paintings and notice things and learn things as I was doing the paintings. That’s rewarding, but it’s much more satisfying to learn all those things ahead of time and then sit down to do the paintings.
There were quite a few times when I would learn things just as I was finishing a painting and have to go back and make changes. The pace of learning was so high that you just know that if you’d kept at it, if I’d kept at it for three more hours with each species, I would have learned new things and could’ve put them into the illustrations.
In that way, the real pleasure is being out in the field and seeing these trees in real life and studying them and getting to know them, and then putting it all on paper. The way this book went -- and I knew it would be this kind of project -- it was a little bit of field time and lot of painting and book research, which was nowhere near as much fun. [Laughs]
Are you going on the road to promote the book soon?
Yes. I’ll be starting September 12 near Philadelphia and have a month and a half, through the end of October, of events all over the country.
Is it true that you were kind of surprised by the broad appeal of The Sibley Guide to Birds when it came out?
Yeah, I had no idea what to expect. I didn’t really think it would be a big seller beyond the really serious birders, and my guess, based on what I know about subscriptions and other memberships of different groups, is that might be a hundred or two hundred thousand people at the most. And it went well beyond that.
Can you identify a core tree constituency or readership? Is there a group that you have targeted with this book?
The group that I’ve targeted all along, from the moment that I came up with the idea, was birdwatchers. I wanted it to be a tree guide for birdwatchers. From a marketing point of view, the best-defined group that I can think of as an audience is birdwatchers. There are lots of other people who are interested in trees -- as gardeners, as landscapers, as foresters, or just as, just naturalists. That’s the big wild card as far as sales. I don’t know how many of those people there are and how interested they’ll be.
Do you think the tree book could make readers better birdwatchers?
I suppose I should say yes. [Laughs] Yeah, I think, well, I think I learned a tremendous amount, and it’s given me a new, slightly different perspective on birds and bird taxonomy, so yeah, from the point of view of just broadening your expertise, broadening your perspective, it has made a big difference in how I look at birds.
Do you envision birdwatchers taking The Sibley Guide to Birds and The Sibley Guide to Trees out in the field?
Yeah, I do. [Chuckles] I hope that people will get a good sturdy backpack and take both books out in the field. I think that most of the places people go birding, they’ll find a fairly limited number of tree species. Once you start to get a few of the common species down -- just like birds, after you learn the first few species, the rest start to fall into place and then you start to see, to notice the ones that really look different from the ones you know, and you can track down an identification for those.
David, I think this has been really great, and I really appreciate your answers. Thank you for taking the time.
Terrif’. No problem.
This is Part 3 of a three-part interview. Go back to Part 1. Go back to Part 2.
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