When I'm Hungry
written by Jane R. Howard, illustrated by Teri Sloat
Dutton, 1992

Reviews

School Library Journal: Each page is a lesson in habitat: jungle, garden, forest, backyard. Plants and settings are carefully portrayed in vivid colors rendered in fine colored-pencil shadings of greens, blues, and browns.

Booklist: …Sloat's full-page color-pencil illustrations exploit the sense of play, from the picture of the child eating lunch in the mud with the hippos to the view of him digging for worms with the birds.

Kirkus: …nicely realized in Sloat's bright, charmingly detailed illustrations, which vary the child's size in accordance with the animals companions.

About the Book

Although the character in the book is a boy, my daughter, Becky, was the model for every page. We had her pose for the boy flying through the jungle going from ring to ring at school. For the picture with the duck, she posed hanging upside down on the bars. In the squirrel picture, Becky is not holding a giant nut, she is holding a Nerf football.

In the research for this book, my best resources were Zoobooks magazine and Ranger Rick. My son, Matt, was 16 when I was finishing the book, and he used the Prismacolor pencils and colored the backgrounds for the squirrel and eagle pictures.

The idea for the hummingbird scene in the book comes from a mural on the side of a building in Cloverdale—a town about 30 miles away from my home in Sebastopol, California.

I did not write this book, but it was one of my favorites to illustrate because I love drawing and learning about animals.