The Los Angeles Zoo has a family-friendly Halloween celebration throughout October every year. This year they dressed up their old Adventure Island caves with spooky and educational exhibits.
The old Adventure Island caves at the Los Angeles Zoo
I was asked to design signage graphics for the exhibits less than two weeks before their press event. For those of you that enjoy reading how illustrations are made efficiently, here is a sort of how-to.
I was told that the theme was "old-fashioned mad scientist." I showed a few drawings I had done along those lines, and the event committee confirmed that it was the style they were looking for.
Ginkgo pneumoloba by Michelle Leveille for Pitt Med Magazine. Click to see issue with more illustrations for "The Ecology Within" article, page 14
Epiphyte Delight Co. website created by Michelle Leveille
So after gathering information about what sizes the signs would be and what they would read, I set about designing their layouts.
Sign layout is a balance of text and graphics. Since old-fashioned mad scientist fonts are not as forgiving to work with, I started by searching for the best typeface first, one that was legible and yet looked like it was handwritten in an old folio of scientific annotations. Here were a few runners-up:
Anke Calligraphic fg wasn't as legible, so I didn't use it.
Typographer Puritan didn't come in bold or italic, so I didn't use it.
Goudy Bookletter 1911 didn't come in bold or italic either, but I like it enough that I'm considering using it here on my website.
Antiquarian is a bit hard to read, but other than that it fit the bill.
I chose Antiquarian and its italic version, Antiquarian Scribe. The low “x” height and wide serifs made it semi-illegible, but it looked pretty good when I hand-distressed it in Photoshop to make it appear to be written with a quill pen.
After finding a background image of distressed paper, (either one I scanned from an antique book or one from www.cgtextures.com), I laid out the signs with their text. Most of the signs had room for a small image above the headline and a wide illustration along the bottom.
Here is an example of a small image above a headline:
[Note: I removed the sign text and placed my business name on the following graphics. Sorry to have to do that, but the sign text was written by skilled people who deserve to make their own decisions about where and when their craft will be put on display. I feel that displaying their sign text on my blog would be implying that I deserved credit for their work. Also, I've found through experience that if I don't disrupt my illustrations with my digital watermark, others may take it. So I added my business name to protect my oeuvre and the assets of those who paid me for the artwork.]
This was for a sign about axolotls, which are a special species of salamander that don't mature out of their larval stage. This species is extinct in the wild, but there is a large captive population in scientific laboratories and the pet trade. The portrait of the axolotl is a reference to The Picture of Dorian Gray, a philosophical novel about a man who never ages. A follower on Facebook commented that the image (which they thought was an axolotl looking in the mirror) was very symbolic. The more I thought about it, the more I agreed - the anthropomorphic characterization of the salamander caught in it's youthful state could be a reflection of humankind as a beast.
Here is the wide illustration I placed at the bottom of the same sign:
Axolotl with hand mirror by Michelle Annette Leveille
To make both of the images, I researched photos of axolotls using Google Image Search online. I used the reference images to draw a sketch of the animal in Photoshop. Then I colored the drawings on a lower layer. I set the line art layer to "multiply" in the opacity options. It made the drawing look more like it had been hand-inked.
I drew a few more images using the same technique. Here are some examples of the ones that went smoothly.
Anatomy of a cat's eye showing the tapetum, by Michelle Annette Leveille
Binocular vision in primates, illustration by Michelle Annette Leveille
I was running out of time, though. I needed to pick up the pace. So rather than creating my own artwork from scratch by drawing the animals in Photoshop, I followed the following five steps to be more efficient.
1. I started copying the parts of the reference images that I needed and placing them in Photoshop.
2. I would assemble enough photos, creating a sort of digital collage, until I had the shape of the image that I wanted.
3. Then I would trace the image on another layer and delete the original photo layer. I would be left with the line art which was the outline of the illustration I was making. I set that layer to "multiply" opacity.
4. Then, as before, I would fill in the drawing on another layer.
5. I would add touches such as shadows and lighting effects on other layers until the illustrations appeared consistent in style.
Completed dung beetle illustration for Boo at the L.A. Zoo cave sign, by Michelle Annette Leveille
Here are some more illustrations I made by following those five steps:
Thermal image of a rat by Michelle Annette Leveille
Brown widow and anvil illustration by Michelle Annette Leveille
California leaf-nosed bat illustration by Michelle Annette Leveille
The following illustrations were made by tracing over old public-domain drawings as well as photographs.
Mace and hedgehogs illustrations by Michelle Annette Leveille
Moth and yucca flowers by Michelle Annette Leveille
Spider anatomy illustration by Michelle Annette Leveille
These next illustrations were each problematic in their own way.
One sign was about how the diet of an animal can generally be deduced by the location of its eyes. Herbivores tend to be prey, so their eyes are on the side to look out for predators. Carnivores need depth perception to hunt, so their eyes are stereo-typically on the front. My issue was that the animals the committee had chosen to portray were either not ones that the zoo had in its collection, or else the animals just weren't very spooky.
So I illustrated them in such a way that you would not only see their eye placement, but you would also see their teeth. Here is an herbivore. Her head is angled to demonstrate the placement of her eyes, and her scary grazing teeth.
Killer bunny illustration by Michelle Annette Leveille
The predator was supposed to be illustrated as a cat or an owl, but we already had images of those animals on other signs.
So I started to draw a spooky black bird instead.
A sort of combination crow and raven portrait by Michelle Annette Leveille
Unfortunately, it was correctly pointed out to me that crows and ravens are omnivores, not just predators, so this sketch was scrapped. We used a wolf instead.
Snarling wolf by Michelle Annette Leveille
I had drawn a frog to show how eyes on top of the head can be an indicator that an animal is one that hides underwater.
Frog drawing by Michelle Annette Leveille
But with the crow/raven gone from the top of the sign now, the frog was cropped to fit in the little image circle there.
Frog illustration by Michelle Annette Leveille
That sign was checked off the list.
Here’s another one that took longer than usual as well.
The sign about bat wings was also problematic because we wanted to show the homologous bones in the human hand and also bird wings. But there wasn’t very much space on the sign, and the bones needed to be shown as large as possible in order to see the similarities across species. The bat with its wing skeleton was placed in the starring position at the top of the sign.
Mexican free-tailed bat by Michelle Annette Leveille
The human arm and hand fit on one side of the narrow strip of space at the bottom. The problem was finding a bird wing to fit next to it. I was trying to think of a bird that had a long skinny wing, which was spooky and lived at the zoo, and had as many vestigial phalanges left as possible.
The zoo is famous for breeding California condors and bringing them back from the brink of extinction. But condor wings hardly have any digits left in their skeletal structure.
Mike Clark in the documentary, The Condor’s Shadow. Click on the image to learn more about the movie.
Hoatzin birds have wings that are so similar to human hands that they actually have clawed “fingers” that they use to help themselves stay in trees when they are young. But the zoo didn’t have hoatzins, and people are generally unfamiliar with that kind of bird.
A hoatzin chick grasps its branch with extra digits on its wings.
People are familiar with quail. Those birds have many vestigial phalanges in their little wings. But their stubby wings were the wrong shape for the allotted space.
I peculated this quail wing image from ChimeraCurio’s Etsy shop. If you really want to buy a quail wing, click on the image and you’ll go there.
Finally it dawned on me…
…CALIFORNIA BROWN PELICANS!
They used to live in the exhibit next to the caves. Their wings had the right shape, and they had plenty of extra bones in their wings where humans have fingers.
Arm and wing homologies by Michelle Annette Leveille
That was another design problem solved!
The sign below had text about how elephant shrews save energy by slowing down their metabolism. When I started doing image searches for elephant shrews to make the graphics for the sign, I realized there are at least two different types of elephant shrews: the Cape elephant shrew and the giant (black-and-rufous) elephant shrew. I didn’t know what kind the zoo had on display, and there wasn’t time to ask. So I traced over photos of one type and colored them to look like the other. I figured the illustrations might be partway wrong, but not all the way.
Well, it turned out there is a third type of elephant shrew that I didn’t know about: the short-eared elephant shrew. The illustrations I made came close to it, but the color was slightly too dark.
Now I’ve confessed most of my artist secrets to you.
Spooky book by Michelle Annette Leveille
Thank you for reading this far! If you liked what you saw, please feel free to hit an icon below to share the news or contact Michelle at Artifact Graphics.
