Trapped inside an obsolete topology, a pavement ant explores the tangled jungle of Escher’s lost maze, her quest complicated by every new angle. • Pavement ant | Tetramorium caespitum
Author: Rick Lieder
Painter and photographer Rick Lieder has been creating fine art and conceptual illustration for many years. His art has appeared on award-winning novels ranging from mysteries and science fiction, to books based on the X-Files TV series, to Newbery Award-winning books for children, A Single Shard and Princess Academy.
His work has been published widely in magazines and online (Orion, Natural
History Magazine and others), and by HarperCollins, Random House, Simon &
Shuster and Farrar, Straus & Giroux and more.
Recently he has concentrated on a body of work centering on ordinary backyard wildlife. These photographs capture the unique qualities of light interacting with the natural world, including luminous photographs of honey bees and small birds in flight, glowing fireflies mating and hovering over twilight fields, mosquitoes with a belly full of blood, and new-born praying mantis nymphs emerging from their egg cases.
STEP GENTLY OUT is his new nature picture book for all ages, a collaboration between painter and photographer Rick Lieder and novelist and poet Helen Frost.
Three starred reviews from Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly and Booklist. Kirkus Reviews has selected Step Gently Out as one of four outstanding poetry titles for children to be featured on the Kirkus website for National Poetry Month, along with an interview.
A website with all the news, reviews and up-to-date information for the book, plus a book trailer: http://bugdreams.com/sgo/
Pollen Smugglers
Lured back to the hive after a heist gone bad, a pair of pollen smugglers ignore the bright chaos, their crimes darken the sky. • Honey bee | Apis mellifera
Wooed by Gravity
Wooed by gravity, she closes her eyes and falls from heaven as the sun dazzles her wings. • Sparrow | Passer domesticus
Cobwebs Shiver
Cobwebs shiver with her tiniest move, a mantis nymph rules an underworld ready for a brutal reckoning, the next instar a far-off dream. • Praying mantis | Tenodera aridifolia sinensis
Chaotic Grace
Waiting for the blade to bend, stranded on a windblown space tower, a beetle on the lam moves with chaotic grace. • Scarab beetle
Hallucinations & Memories
She bends others to her will with a splash of red, leaving hallucinations and memories of the wind’s wild side. • Northern Cardinal | Cardinalis cardinalis
Unruly Atoms
In the shadow of a blue moon, a firefly cages unruly atoms, summer heat struggling to break free. • Firefly | Lampyridae | Photinus pyralis
Her Golden Eye
Shaking herself awake, a lacewing preens, her golden eyes scanning a world where nothing new has happened in years. • Golden-eyed Lacewing | Chrysopa oculata