Diary of a zoo illustrator: I have some catching up to do!

For one reason or another I have neglected to get round to posting for the last two weeks. Naughty girl!

So here we go for a bit of a marathon catch up, I will try and keep it brief so as not to make it too long and a bit of a slog to get through.

August 5^th – 7^th

On the Monday of this week the blue spiny lizard was checked and ok’d by the animal section – no alterations to make, they were very happy with it; which was a great relief.

This illustration was done bigger than I normally work (to make it easier on my eyes) so I had to scan the painting on our little A4 scanner in two sections and then in Photoshop, ‘photomerge’ the two scans together. This worked much better than I anticipated so I am feeling very pleased that this will mean I am not limited to doing everything now less than A4. There will be some species that will be better to do a larger scale, now that my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be for painting detail. Such a relief!

Once I had scanned and photomerged the lizard, I could then drop the picture file onto the ID document and print it ready to laminate and take over to the Reptile House. Two copies are needed as there are two separate displays – one with adults and one with juveniles.

Today is ID sweep day… I started this last week so I was able at the same time to put up the IDs I had prepared back then. On my ID Sweep’s I walk the zoo grounds and through the animal houses checking the condition of the ID signs, cleaning any that are mucky with dust, cobwebs, dirt etc. I take note of those that will need replacing due to being faded or damaged or even missing; this can take a few hours to do properly.

Once back in the studio I contact other departments like gardeners or maintenance if there are any jobs that relate to the ID signs that may need addressing such as a broken or wobbly post that IDs are attached to or plants obscuring the signs. I also start on the computer printing the ID’s that need replacing.

On Tuesday I carried on with the printing of ID replacements and then started the process of trimming them to size, laminating them, trimming and then putting double-sided tape on the backs. Not a great deal else was done that day, the making of the signs kept me busy enough.

On Wednesday I put up the ID’s that were ready, printed and laminated a couple more bird IDs, as well as hole-punched and put the metal eyelets in the bird IDs for Forest of Birds. At the end of the day I did a ‘top up’ ref search for the next species on my list to do… the Indian six spot ground beetle Anthia sexguttata as well as an upcoming species the iridescent shark catfish Pangasius sanitwongasei. I gathered together the images that I wanted to help me paint the beetle and was looking forward to starting it next week.

However on my way home I saw Mark, Assistant Curator - Invertebrates, and mentioned that I was about to start the beetle next week. He told me that unfortunately there would be little point now as there was only one beetle left (the others all having come to the end of their natural life span) and they had not managed to breed this difficult species (many collections have tried and failed - it would seem the exact conditions needed for this species to breed in captivity have not yet been replicated successfully). If he were to try again with another group of these impressive beetles, the animals he would end up with would be wild caught and ethically Mark did not want to pursue this. He had hoped with the group he had acquired, he could successfully get them breeding to create a sustainable captive population.

August 12^th – 14^th

Monday

There were just a few ID’s left to finish off from the ID Sweep… four mammal signs in Twilight World. Dave, Education Manager, had seen them and thought it might be best to revise the text as they were written over 10 years ago. So I printed the IDs and gave him the copies to review. These were also old Freehand documents so I carried on with the process of converting and adjusting some elements of the layout to a more up to date look. Fonts were change and made consistent along with the size of the text being enlarged to make it easier to read in the low light levels, which took me most of the day to do. I also printed another ID for the underground area of Seal and Penguin Coast for the spiny starfish and their present tank companion, an edible crab.

Tuesday

Finished off the new spiny starfish/edible crab ID and put that up in situ. Got the revised texts back from Education for the Twilight World IDs, so I was able to finish them and get them back up on show in the Forest area. Copies of the other ID’s in that area have been left with Dave to look through and revise when they can.

Wednesday

Spent most of the morning updating ID files to the server as Back-up. This week there have been discussions between Dave and myself on the process for ID requests text - a batch of recently done ID’s (not yet on show) were shown to have a number of errors in the text or Dave wasn’t quite happy with the wording of the content. Some would need to be redone! To try and minimise this kind of problem in the future we thought about the process and revised the procedure to ensure mistakes are caught at an earlier stage – before the sign is printed.

Looking at my ‘To Do’ board I saw that my next species is a Giant Ghana land snail Achatina achatina … so I checked my ref photo’s and printed off a selection to work from. I managed to get the drawing done for this species before the end of the day, which I can start painting next week hopefully.

Giant Ghana land snail

My list continues after the landsnail with a bird (wrinkled hornbill) and then five fish. The bird already had an ID with a photo out on display but the fish were fairly new and as yet had no ID at all. So I compiled the IDs with their information (but no picture) and following the revised procedure I sent a copy of the final sign to Jonny, Assistant Curator - Aquarium, to check the facts and common/scientific names.

And to finish I have a few photo's taken recently at the zoo...