Diary of a zoo illustrator: A week of sun at the zoo... yeehaa!

Monday 3rd

This week I am due to do my bi-monthly 'ID sweep', but first I want to finish the common chameleon.... I have only the tail left to paint.

I have brought in something to help me do close work... some magnifiers that I attach to my glasses. They make me look a bit like some crazy scientist, but they are just the job for allowing me to see the end of my brush when I'm putting on small details like hairs, spines or dots.

So I finished the chamelon in relative eye comfort. I have had these magnifiers for sometime but had forgotten about them... rather silly as I could have really used them when I was painting that great plated lizard a while back.

So the chameleon was finished and checked by Andy in the Reptile House and this time there were no adjustments to be made. Phew! So it was scanned onto the computer and the picture file placed onto the ID document. Once printed, I laminated it and trimmed it ready to take to the Reptile House later.

During the afternoon I went out around the zoo to do my 'ID sweep'. I have a set route that I follow taking me around all the enclosures and animal houses so that I can check the state of all the ID signage. I clean any that are dirty, restick those that are loose or peeling and make a note of all those that I think need replacing; such as faded, damaged or missing signs.

This took me about 2 hours today, shorter than normal as I didn't have time to get round to the bird house in the centre of the zoo or around the lake. It was almost 5pm and the animal houses close at that time, so I shall do that another day.

Back in the studio I wrote my to do lists up... one for the replacements and one for people I need to contact about different queries I had as a result of my walkabout. Things like.. plants needing cutting back so an entrance sign does not get obscured, checking with an animal section if a sign is missing whether the enclosure is empty or the sign has come off for some other reason.

I had met Mark and Carmen from Bug World in Twilight World on my walkabout.. they were just finishing sorting out a new enclosure in the underground area for some juvenile imperial scorpions... so a new ID sign would be needed. I had illustrated this species many years ago so it was just a question of presenting the illustration and text in a way that was suitable for the enclosure situation. In the underground area the signs are all white text on black... allowing for either the sign to be backlit or illuminated with 'dark light' making the white glow bright with a bluish colour. So I would need to adjust the illustration to be a silhouette, so that was my next job this afternoon and into tomorrow morning.

I started with a copy of the illustration on the computer and carefully went around the outer edge of the body, legs and hairs with the brush tool set to red colour (about 5 pixels width) in Photoshop. I couldn't do a mask because the nature of the illustration meant the boundary between the animal, shadows and background merged in similar colours that would confuse a mask setting. I did try it first, as it is obviously the easiest and quickest route, but it didn't work so I was back to manually outlining the wee beastie. This was quite intense concentration and so for a break I stopped to photocopy 30 ID guides for the butterfly exhibit.

Tuesday 4th

I carried on with the imperial scorpion outlining it in red as I was doing yesterday. Once the animal was outlined and the background a flat red, I then drew over the body of the scorpion with the brush tool (still set to red) marking in the body and legs segments. (More photoshop blurb coming up..) I selected the colour range for the red and inverted it so I could, with a greatly enlarged brush tool (200+ pixels), sweep across the scorpion and change its colour to a flat white. Undoing the 'invertion' I could then sweep over the background and scorpion changing the red lines and background to black. This was then saved and ready to drop onto the ID sign.

Before I started on the text sign for the scorpion, I finished the butterfly ID guides by putting each one in an A4 laminating pouch. Anna helped by putting them through the laminator for me, as she needed an eye break from the computer screen.

I opened the old ID sign for the animal that used to be housed in the exhibit that the scorpions were going in. This was so that I had a template to work from as the text is 'wrapped' into an uneven shape. The ID sign is backlit and displayed in a shaped hole by the side of the tunnel system of the exhibit. So opening up the old sign gave me the size of text, the font, the shape etc to copy.

I ended up just changing the text to that which is on the scorpion ID and added the silhouette that I finished this morning. The finished size is slightly bigger than A3 (when it was design we were able to produce a sign on a transparent film the old way using a repro camera and fixer chemicals etc in a darkroom... so the size was not confined to A3. Now however I will have to print the sign out from the computer on 2 sheets of A3 and join them together.

In the late afternoon we had a treat as Dave, the Education Manager, gave a little show of some of his photo's that he took on a trip to Borneo. And after that I started printing out some of the replacement IID signs from my list.

Wednesday 5th

I carried on printing the list of replacement IDs and in the process had to convert a number of them from Quark files to Illustrator files. I'm gradually getting through all the outstanding Quark files.

I also rang the site manager out at the Hollywood Towers Estate to find out what the new protocols are now for visiting, as since the builders and other contractors have been there building and preparing the site for the opening of Wild Place this summer it's not so easy to walk around the site. I am planning to there this afternoon to do some sketching. It's my afternoon to sketch and I thought it would be good to get back to the estate again before it opens to the public and wandering around takes on a whole new aspect. Gone will be the times of wandering around with no-one else around, enjoying the wildlife and place in peace and quiet. So this would be one of the last times I would be able to do that.

Also I had some birds to see and photograph that are kept there at the moment so I left late morning and drove out to the estate. Once I had spent a good time watching and photoing the birds I had some lunch and then set off into the woods. I shall do a separate post about my afternoon in the woods.

A few photo's from round the zoo this week.