Mary Azarian: Hi, this is Mary Azarian, and I illustrated Snowflake Bentley. I'm going to tell you a bit about how I did the illustrations.

My process has two important parts. The basic illustration is done with a woodcut. I draw the picture on a piece of wood and then use cutting knives, called gouges, to carve the image. I remove all of the wood with the gouges, leaving only the lines that I've drawn. It is important to remember that the image will be reversed when it is printed. The wood block is printed in black ink, and after the ink dries, which takes a day or so, I add the colors with a water-based paint.

One of the advantages of a woodcut is that once the block is carved, many prints can be made of the same picture. That way I can vary the color until I get an effect that I think is right for the illustration.

I'll talk a bit about the pages that show Snowflake Bentley's neighbors riding by his farmhouse in a horse-drawn sleigh while he is collecting snowflakes on a board covered with a piece of black velvet.

In order to photograph the snowflakes, he had a special camera that had a microscope attached to enlarge the snowflake. He had to do the photographing process in a shed outside his house, because if he brought the snowflake inside, it would melt before he could photograph it.

His neighbors thought it was foolish and a waste of time to photograph snow, since millions of snowflakes fall in Vermont every winter, and they were considered as common as dirt, but Snowflake Bentley didn't care what anyone thought. He thought that snowflakes in the individual crystals were so incredibly beautiful that it was worth spending almost seventy years of his life photographing them every winter.

As I worked on this illustration, I thought about how wonderful it is to find something you love to do and enjoy working on, or learning about, for your whole life. Snowflake Bentley left us thousands of beautiful snowflakes that continue to delight and educate people over a hundred years after he lived.