Roti Island snake neck turtle and not much else

I spent most of my three days at the zoo this week in the studio doing the illustration for the Roti Island snake neck turtle - Chelodina mccordi. This is a strange looking turtle yet quite endearing too, especially when you look at the face front on. See last week's post for a photo of this smiley turtle.

Monday 15th

The morning was spent drawing up the turtle from the reference photo's I had gathered. As this species is aquatic I wanted to portray the animal in water, it frequents shallow areas where it sits with its head poking out of the water. The most important feature, from the public's point of view, for identifying this species is the neck. So doing a side on view would work well. From the photo references I combined several images to put the turtle in a position I was happy with. So the body of the shell and neck position came from one image, the front leg from another, and the rear leg from yet another. I used two other images for detailing as the head and neck were hard to get any details from on the image I used for their positioning. 

My final drawing

After lunch I started painting the background, which I made up after some thought and experiments on how I would approach it. I wanted to get the feel of a shallow area of water yet be light to show up the turtle. As I was doing the turtle side on in view I wanted to create a sense of recession in the background. 

To try and achieve this effect I used a thin-ish wash of gouache and starting with a pale yellow green  from the middle I blended it out top and bottom into two other colours.. a green blue and a sandy brown. Whilst the paint was still reasonably damp I added some dark and light tones into the sandy brown to indicate a rough surface with perhaps stones or pebbles in amongst the sand and put in a bigger stone shape to the left of the composition and then some tendrils of weeds 'wafting' in the current towards the right. I hoped this would help make it look watery so that when the turtle went on he looked like he was swimming not floating in mid-air. I did a quick scan on the computer to see how the colours would come out on screen and that would give me a better indication of how it would look once printed. The colours came out more yellowy but that suited me fine as it appeared to enhance the underwater feel.

I traced the outline of the turtle from my drawing onto the painting and blocked it in with a pale blue green and then added the shadow. Sometimes it is hard to tell, when working on a piece, to know if the image you are wanting to achieve is working or not... being the creator gives you an insight into what you want to achieve.. however anybody else looking at it does not have that insight and so sees it in a different way... a more objective way. I knew my turtle was swimming and I hoped it looked that way to others... but to check this I asked my colleagues, Anna and Phil. They both saw the turtle as floating in air, not swimming in water. After a brief discussion of ways to improve that I added some other elements to the background.

Adding a line of through the water, as if the view was a 'cut through', and having this line just cutting through the top of the carapace (shell) gives a more immediate effect of the turtle being in water. Add to that another larger rock so that the addition of more blue and lighter colours to the top above the line creates a distinct difference in colour tones between above and below the line i.e. above and below the water. 

In between some painting when I was waiting for coats to dry I added two more ID photo's to the rockpool ID panels, one for a velvet swimming crab and the other for a gobi fish. I am waiting for an update from Bug World on what species are still current in this exhibit as there have been a few changes, so that I can add and remove a few species from the ID document before printing the revised version out again.

Tuesday 16th

Today I did nothing else except paint the turtle.  I worked first on the neck and head and then moved to the carapace (the upper part of the shell) and plastron (the underneath part of the shell). 

I did manage to pop out briefly across to the office and took some video of the meerkats and Jock the silverback western lowland gorilla. I wanted to capture the lovely sounds the meerkats make as they constantly chatter to each other.

Meerkat chatter

Jock enjoying a bit of coconut - imagine the power in those jaws as he crunches into the shell to get at the raw coconut inside.

Wednesday 17th

Back to the turtle in the morning, adding more texture to the carapace and painting in the legs and feet. I added some lighter colour to the neck and darkened some parts of the background slightly to enable the light areas to show up better. I finished the illustration just before lunchtime and managed to catch Tim (Curator of Reptiles and Amphibians) in his office. He was busy preparing presentations for several talks he has to do at conferences but he was able to give me a few minutes to look over the illustration. He gave it the ok which meant I could get straight on with scanning the image after lunch. 

Roti Island snake neck turtle - Chelodina mccordi

I already had done the map distribution and had placed the text (from the Education section) on the ID document in a previous week, ready for the illustration to be placed. Once it was imported into the document, resized to fit the picture block set for this format of sign, I could then print it onto an A3 sheet of photo quality paper as there are two parts to each reptile and amphibian ID sign each just short of A4 in length but only about 4" wide. So the ID template is set up to print both parts side by side onto an A3 sheet. I did two copies, changing the header for one version to add the word 'juveniles' after the common name of the species. The adult female will go on show into one of the pools in the Reptile House (she is currently housed off show in the breeding room). She laid a number of eggs after her arrival at the zoo and a number of baby turtles have been successfully hatched and are also off show at the moment, being reared in a safe controlled environment until they are big enough to go on show in the breeding room. This is a rare turtle species, so these youngsters are very important for the captive breeding programme. 

Also today I had an email from the bird section, a masked plover had been placed into another aviary in addition to the ones we already have on show; so after checking my hard copy files to see if I had any ID signs already done, I then printed an extra two copies of this ID to laminate and put up on the appropriate aviary. It was nice to get out in the air, I felt I have been chained to my desk for the last day or so. 

As part of that email from the bird section there was an ID request for a new species. A wrinkled hornbill or Sunda Wrinkled Hornbill - Aceros corrugatus. This species is not yet on the zoo premises so I can't yet get any of my own reference or see the birds in person, to get that all important 'feel' for them. I did an internet search for images of this species and took a number to file for the future when I have to paint this bird.

Next week I have another reptile to do.