John Hare: Hello, my name is John Hare and I'm the author and illustrator of the book, Field Trip to the Ocean Deep. The concept for me for the Field Trip books is a future where field trips are safe and common and people can go to places that seem risky and outrageous to us. But to them, it's no different than going on a field trip to the Grand Canyon.

I made a Field Trip to the Ocean Deep wordless because I like that these stories just use the pictures to pull the reader through, and the reader can add their own stories as well. They're going where you take them, but they're having to fill in the gaps with their own experiences and their own information of these places, and so they end up making a unique story. Every reader who looks at a wordless picture book ends up with a unique story out of it, and I think that's the coolest thing.

When I created a Field Trip to the Ocean Deep, I didn't want it to be like other ocean books that are lots of times centered around the reefs with all the colorful life. I wanted to go deep, deep down to the bottom of the deep ocean, where the sunlight doesn't penetrate, where life is rare and very specialized. It's not at all super common like it is around the shores, and where the pressure is absolutely crushing. But I did know I wanted it to be very dark, and that presents some challenges to me.

So I wanted a very, very deep blue and I wasn't sure what that was. There was a point where I just had scraps of wood with every conceivable combination of Cerulean and phthalo blue and Prussian blue and all these different mixes, trying to find the right blue that would have a darkness to it and a depth to it and I just want it to look a particular way. And not only that, but everything had to have this blue infused to it, because when you're in the deep ocean, you're also looking through water at things.

So I couldn't let the creatures be too bright and I wanted it to be real dark other than the light sources, which were lights on the helmets of these students' deep sea diving suits. And I was really riding this thin line of how I want it to be very dark, but not so dark that you can't understand what's happening. And so it was tricky, making the art for this one is very tricky, giving it an isolated dark feel that I think is very important for being under miles of ocean.