Sketches of an author

NEWPORT BEACH — If the students at Harbor Day School are lucky, they may find their faces in Brian Selznick’s next book.

The children’s author and illustrator, who visited Harbor Day on Friday to talk about his novel “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” often uses real-life models to sketch his characters’ faces. Selznick based the hero of “Cabret,” a French orphan in the 1930s who lives in a train station, on a boy he saw at the Natural History Museum. And the book’s female lead got her features from a girl at a pizza parlor.

It was sometimes hard getting strangers to pose, Selznick said, but his rising fame had made the subjects — and their parents — more receptive to being immortalized in pencil.

“Now that I’ve been working for a while, some of the kids have read my other books,” he told the crowd of students that packed the Harbor Day theater after lunch.

As Selznick explained, that was the creative process in a nutshell: part frustrating and part exhilarating. He spent more than two years working on “Cabret,” he said, and did copious research along the way — on three occasions flying to Paris to examine the train stations that created the setting for his story.

The format of “Cabret” is unusual, with some of the book’s 544 pages devoted to text and many others using pictures to tell the story. Selznick said the technique was inspired by silent movies, which juxtaposed brief snatches of text with much longer wordless passages. Parts of the book even use “zoom” effects with a series of pictures narrowing in on a small detail of a scene.

During his hourlong presentation, Selznick displayed a number of images from “Cabret” on the overhead projector and took questions from the audience. He responded to a question about his training as an artist by saying that he considered his training ongoing.

“I’m still learning how to draw,” he said. “I look at my drawings, and I like my drawings, but I always think I can do better.”

Students lined up afterward with copies of “Cabret” to get Selznick’s autograph in the library. Third-grader Evan Jones, 9, said he had finished the book and loved it.

“It’s really cool,” he said. “The pictures are really cool. I was surprised how good it was.”

Sixth-grader Lauren Anderson, 12, said she plans to be a writer — and hearing Selznick speak had encouraged her to keep going.

“I really like reading, so it was really exciting,” she said.