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What are your favorite tools for making art?

My favorite book-making tools are the 2B pencil, the eraser and Adobe Photoshop and InDesign.  The pencil and eraser are the basis for any illustration I'd think, including mine.  I find that InDesign combined with Photoshop is the greatest thing since sliced bread for bookmaking.   It's so much fun once I start adding in bits of drawing and text to turn it into a book. It can be really quite addictive. But I guess it could all be done with just a pencil, paper, scissors and tape.  Only InDesign makes it so much quicker and flexible.  It's sort of like comparing a pen and notebook to a word processor.

As for drawing... I mostly erase.  

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Is this your first book of historical non-fiction?

Yes. I seem to be attracted to certain parts of history that captivate me. Sometimes history can seem like a big museum filled with amazing wonders... and it's entirely my own to freely wander around in.  I think it all depends on how history is presented and whether one can feel any direct connection to the past. 

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 What led you to create Cromwell Dixon's Sky-Cycle?

It all happened quite accidentally. One day at the library I came across a book of photographs from 1907. It was so captivating I couldn't put it down.  Looking through the book at home I was stopped in my tracks by a photograph of Mrs. Dixon in her victorian dress and hat out riding hundreds of feet up in the air on a crazy looking dirigible!  The surreal effect of this photo was the spark that started me down the long road to the book Cromwell Dixon's Sky-Cycle.

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John Abbott Nez is our guest blogger during the week of May 18th. If you have any questions for John Abbott Nez, add a comment to any of his posts.

View the video on the book page.

Here is more information on Cromwell Dixon's Sky Cycle:

In the years and decades following the Wright Brothers' famous first flight, an obsession with aviation gripped the nation. Thousands caught the bug. In an era of innovation and invention, scores of people pursued their own personal dreams of building a flying machine, and many did so right in their own backyards.

Few stories, though, are as remarkable as that of Cromwell Dixon, a fourteen-year-old boy who successfully designed, built and flew what he dubbed his "Sky-Cycle"-literally a flying bicycle, that he could fully steer, and that he flew thousands of feet in the air.