HERE'S ONE OF THE BACKGROUNDS you didn't see in the animated feature film Watership Down. I worked in the background department where I produced this experimental design for the Cowslip's Warren sequence. It was created using a home-made scraper board technique. I covered the paper with wax crayon, painted over it in brown india ink and, when the ink was dry, scraped through the layer of ink to create the design of roots and pebbles.
Spare a thought for Tony Guy, head of animation, and his team of 20 or 30 animators, they had to produce 50,000 individual drawings of rabbits to complete the 90 minute film!
'I had a terrible dream last night,' he told us one morning, 'I dreamt the whole team went down with myxomatosis!'
The picture above was included in my exhibition, The Warren and the Web, at Pontefract Museum in May 1999. The show also included a 15 x 8ft canvas of Jurassic Seas painted by Ben Ramsden and myself during the Fossil Roadshow on BBC television, broadcast live from the Natural History Museum in London. My work for the Wild West Yorkshire web site brought the show up to date.
Richard Bell, wildlife illustrator, E-mail;'richard@daelnet.co.uk'
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