Two panoramas of the Lleida plains in eastern Catalonia. Unlike my normal way of doing things (see ‘Nature and its Environment’), in this case the photographs are not mine.

The excellent wildlife photographer Jordi Bas, jovial and highly knowledgeable companion of previous professional and publishing adventures, has commissioned a number of panoramas for the Lleida Plains Interpretation Centre. Given the time of year, it was impossible to take fresh photographs for the project and so I ended up using photographs from Jordi’s extensive archive, which had been taken in different places at different times of year, in different lights, without any thought of future projects.

After a lot of work and a serious ‘make-over’, in the end I came up with two panoramas that – if you had no idea of the tricks and time involved in blending together almost a dozen photographs, taken in different places and at different times – you would think were just a single landscape. Obviously, you can’t expect to see the profusion of wildlife illustrated and integrated into the panorama all at once, or in any one place. Nevertheless, it does reflect the biological richness that these non-irrigated croplands in the Lleida Plain harbour, one of the most beautiful landscapes – and one of the most threatened – in Catalonia.

I have just finished five information boards depicting the natural environments of Els Ports that will decorate the field study centre in the village of Prat del Comte. The work was commissioned by the Natural Park a few months ago and are a good example of how environmental panoramas should be designed with their target audience in mind.

I had already illustrated the Park’s natural environments for my guidebook to this protected area as part of my collection of guides to the flora and fauna. The size of these panoramas, though, was small (11×17 cm), which obliged me to make the animals proportionally much larger so that they could be properly appreciated in the guide. The new batch of redrawn panoramas for the Park are 40×60 cm and all have to be ‘read’ in a different way, more as ‘posters’. They provide more space for adding proportionally smaller elements that are better integrated into the landscape than in the guides, but are still equally visible. I had to redesign the panoramas considerably by returning to the layers of the original document, and then reworking them one-by-one and redoing or adding the animals and elements that were necessary.

The two panoramas in proportion to their original scale. Left, the one originally published in the guide; right, the new poster, 40x60cm.

The same two previous panoramas, shown at the same size: you can spot the differences, with the one on the left showing less, proportionally bigger elements.