One of the things I love to do is paint and draw, so in many ways it has been a natural progression into illustration. Interestingly as a commercial enterprise illustration has much to offer, it is competitive but there is also a steady demand, and when jobs come up you don’t find yourself competing against school kids and weekenders like in photography.

The possible exception to that might be in areas like anime and manga (which keep high school kids occupied for hours in class) and of course the comic industry itself is seriously competitive.

If you can find your own little area though it can provide a stable income. The trick is you do have to know your genre and all of the details that go with it. For me that tends to be wildlife in various forms, although I do dabble in other areas as business requires.

I have been asked how to get started, and well there is only one answer and that is to draw and study. I specifically say draw as without the drawing skills you can forget about painting. This is not some magical thing, just simply practice and a bit of reading, oh and more practice and a pencil and paper.

Once you are comfortable with that bit then you can start experimenting with other materials. The extra good news is an awful lot can be done with only a tin of student pencils. In fact that was what I started with, so I am not just making that up. From there I slowly built up my collection of gear over the years. (Now a whole studio’s worth.)

Regarding materials, I won’t comment on the digital side of creating art, I have tried it now and again, but still have the urge for a real pen/pencil/brush in my hand. Illustrator and photoshop are standards for production work, but even for logos and things I will get out the trusty copics first and go from there.

Anyway moving on from my sidelines, the two things I use most are pencils and watercolours and ink. Often in various combinations. If you are serious you need to start viewing these things as simply tools to get the job done. Using the wrong one just makes life difficult. To be more specific in my case a lot of wildlife (fur n feathers) is so much easier with pencil, and personally nothing beats watercolour for plants. For larger work pastel is useful but does have repo problems – yeah you need to think about the final use of the illustration.

As more time comes up I will try and get more into the nitty gritty of how things get done, from concept into the final book, magazine website and so on. For now though here is a bit of a taster of what can be done…the good and the bad!

Journals are useful to try out ideas and make notes

A journal is a great way of keeping track of ideas and making notes, it doesn’t even have to be anything fancy. These days I tend to use printer paper and staple it into bundles occasionally.

Sometimes it is messy

Rainbow Bee-eater in progress, coloured pencil

With practice preparation and planning you can end up with illustrations like the following Hyacinth Macaw.

Hyacinth-macaw, coloured pencil

In future posts I will go into detail on achieving specific results, but that should give you a small sample to keep your interest up for now.

Biodiversity is thrown around a lot these days, most people know what it is, or at least assume they do. The trouble is it becomes an abstract concept. We need Biodiversity…because we do. It is important because we need all of these things…

In the same conversations I can hear things move onto (exaggerated), “they worry about leaf litter but what about Pandas  or **insert cute cuddly animal **. Sometimes I hear arguments along the lines of, ”…well there are lots of resources out there we don’t even know yet…”

I can’t say economic arguments appeal to me, while undoubtably true, the reality tends to mean no great benefit for the local environment or people. These days it is a general matter of taking samples back to the lab and patenting it.

Aesthetic arguments do work, afterall our world is an amazing place, and in my case I have been thrilled to see what I have. However the emphasis as above tends to go towards the cute and cuddly. I can understand the marketing reasons for that. Reaching out to the mainstream is not that easy these days, so it has to be something that appeals. Still it does tend to give mixed messages. Perceptions that one animal is more important than another.

(Plants barely rate a mention.)

So I am going to come at it from another angle, I haven’t yet met anyone who does not like birds. Oddly I have come across people with Butterfly phobias for some reason. Anyway in terms of biodiversity I hear things like “well we need birds to eat the insects…” Which again in some ways is true ecologically , but if I ask people, even fanatical bird watchers if they like termites or spiders, most tend to just give me a blank stare. Mentioning wasps hardly helps matters.

If I mention that without the above we would lose most bird species I can think of within a few years, people are suddenly more interested. Of course we know things are linked in ecology, but what do spiders, wasps termites and aardvarks have to do with birds? Thought I would throw in the aardvark just to make it more interesting.

Dark-necked Tailorbird

To get to the point with a practical example, many birds depend on a protist (single celled animal) that lives in the gut of termites. Termites can’t actually break down cellulose, so these single celled animals do. (Just like we depend on bacteria in our own gut for different reasons.) Anyway Termites need these organisms and they can then do what termites often do, build a big colony. These are amazing pieces of bioengineering which makes them very stable temperature wise. About 30C from memory, which incidentally is perfect for many birds to nest in. Golden shouldered parrots are just one example, but there are many many more.

Golden Shouldered Parrot

We can find even more complex arrangements, some birds nest in the tunnels of aarvarks, in the actual ceiling of their tunnel. In this case without the termites, no aardvarks, no birds. The South African Shell duck is just one example, but there are lots of others such as Bee-eaters that depend on these tunnels to greater or lesser degrees.

There are also equivalents in South America, alongside other burrow creators such as porcupines. So what I am trying to do is show why often obscure or “ugly” animals matter. Rather than sunbirds or humming birds with their own unique flowers – which are outright gorgeous.

Wasps are important also, although most people either try and avoid them or kill them. Though they are amazing and often spectacular animals. In this case mud daubing wasps – the ones that try and build nests on our exterior walls and often window sills. In this case the interesting thing is to do with the 5% of birds who build mud nests, for example Barn Swallows, but there are many others.

The thing is – if you have ever tried to do it – is that sticking mud to a smooth wall is not that easy. And I imagine much much harder while trying to fly and only using a beak. The birds are smart though, all you really need is a good start to build on, and that is what the wasps provide. If you have ever tried to remove them, you notice how embedded the wasps nests are into the substrate. So birds will generally start there nests over old wasp nests. Once the first bit is stuck on the rest becomes relatively easy…and if your a smart bird you can just tack your nest on alongside and so on.

So even the wasps matter.

The spiders are even more important, crucially important in fact. I don’t know any birds that really concentrate on eating spiders, not even spider hunters, although I am sure plenty of birds will take what they can when they can. The real issue is nests.

In a huge number of cases, what actually holds a nest together is spiderweb. In many ways it is a perfect building material, and birds will fly around collecting it to “glue” their nest together. Others take it to even further extremes, such as the Tailorbirds, where they sew the leaves together with spider web. Still without spiders the fact remains that a huge number of birds would be unable to build their nests without spiders. And of course ultimately the spiders depend on what they eat and so on.

We could go on with thousands of examples, many parrots need to nest in tree cavities again created by insects such as termites and others. Some birds and other animals nest behind curtain or sheet spider web builders. Those enormous thick webs common in forests. In this case most likely to be hidden rather than protected as such.

The thing is we focus on the pretty plants and animals with maybe a vague inkling that they might depend on other things, but all too often the less pleasing plants and animals are seen as more expendable. The truth though is that the connections are hugely complex and removing only one piece can remove an entire segment of life. In that way extinction is not a linear event. We never simply lose one plant or animal but whole chains.

We tend to focus on biodiversity from the top down, whereas it generally is a bottom up system. Fundamentally planton are more important than whales. Leaf litter is more important than a tiger and so on. Losing any of these creatures is a disaster, but as we start to knock out lower levels, we take out whole ranges of species directly and those connected in a less direct way.

So hopefully this short piece gives a more practical example of why some of the more obscure plants and animals matter greatly.