The first 'personality' to be featured in this section is Mike Langman. Mike is among the best-known of present-day Devon birdwatchers, now in his second stint as County Recorder and one of the country's outstanding bird artists. The article reproduced here, penned by Allan Tudor, appeared in the (Torbay) Herald Express on Tuesday 27 January 2009, under the very apt title 'Bringing birds to life on the page'.

MIKE LANGMAN is a freelance wildlife illustrator whose work is seen all across South Devon as well as in bird books and on the internet, writes Allan Tudor.

Yet for a lucky break in life, his career could have been very different. Going for a job for which he had designed the advert was the turning point in Mike's career. He had already 'blagged' his way into the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds with a 'sob story' about how he had worked for the charity as a schoolboy. Full-time work would mean ditching his chances of a degree but he decided the sacrifice was worth it.

Mike at work in his Paignton studio

Mike said: "It was a big decision at the time but looking back it was the right one. My art portfolio would still be built at the RSPB, and when you go to publishers that's what they are interested in. It's about your work, not just the degree. It worked for me very well. I stayed at the RSPB and although I was sad to leave college I was thoroughly enjoying the job and the people around me who were just as enthusiastic as I was."

He was doing a specialist course in scientific illustration at Middlesex Polytechnic in North London, to become a technician in water colour painting, mostly in medical illustration.

"That is still a method used today in medical circles rather than photographs, as they are clearer to see what is going on" he said. "Photographs are not quite as clear-cut, as detailed, as an illustration."

In the third year of his four-year course he was expected to do work experience and fell back on his past and tried for a place at the RSPB in Bedfordshire.
"I gave them a sob story about why they should take me, all the work I had done for them."
He says they fell for the story and he went to work at the charity HQ.

"At the end of those four months they realised the job I was doing was one they needed to have somebody in full time. It was 1983 and I was the first student they had ever taken on. They asked me as part of my work experience to design an advert to go into the national papers for the post. But I thought it was a job I wanted for myself. The RSPB tried to talk me out of it. Not because they didn't like me, but because they felt I really should complete my degree course.

"They packed me off to talk to my parents about it and they were very supportive. They felt completing the degree would be the best option, but, and it was great of them to say so, they did say 'it's up to you'. I could have argued the case that in the art world people only look at your portfolio rather than the piece of paper that says you can do it. Working at the RSPB would give me a real portfolio rather than a make-believe one. I would continue to do that and would meet people who would set me on the right course for work in the future.

"So after talking to the parents, who said 'it is up to you and we will support you in whatever you do', I applied for the job I had advertised and got it."

He stayed in the publications department for four years, working on interpretative centres, designing displays, illustrating murals, travelling all round the country, and seeing lots of different reserves, birds and people. He then took on the job as the RSPB activity organiser for the youth arm of the charity, arranging holidays, events, and roadshows for 300,000 junior members.

One event he organised is still regarded as the biggest one-day event in the charity's history.
It was held at Warwick University with celebrity speakers Sir David Attenborough and Chris Packham and attracted almost 4,000 people in one afternoon.

"It was organised chaos. We had police turn up to try to organise the car park. We knew we would get a lot of people but to get that number was unprecedented. But with headline speakers like Sir David we should have realised it was going to be a big event. People just turned up. I had organised other events at York and we would get 1,200 to 1,500, and we were more than double that and I suppose that is because Warwick is more central."

He was still illustrating in his spare time, moon-lighting as an illustrator for the RSPB but being paid extra. He married childhood sweetheart Tanya Prowse, who he had met when she was 16 through Paignton Swimming Club parties, which he went to with his brothers Andrew, who is now a helicopter pilot, and Steve, who is a policeman. When he started to work at the RSPB she started to train as a nurse at Derriford, and got a job at Addenbrookes Hospital, and they lived in Bedfordshire. When their son Adam was born Mike realised life was becoming a bit tricky.

One of the fortuitous events in his life occurred when he was offered the opportunity of a sabbatical project to illustrate an education booklet on Yemeni birds and after family discussion decided it was too good to miss.

"So I went out there for a couple of weeks with Richard Porter, the then head of species protection, and a member of the Yemeni Government, whose bird background was that he was a chicken breeder. There wasn't a proper ornithologist out there. The Yemini member was a great chap and really enthusiastic and wanted to know the birds but he didn't know what the birds were. The whole experience was just superb."

The booklet was published six months after they returned home and he had to work most evenings and weekends to prepare the illustrations. Richard Porter was also working on a field guide to the birds of the Middle East, and approached Mike and other artists as it was too much work for one.

Mike said: "I certainly wanted to do the work. I realised that, at that stage, there was no way I could continue to work full time at the RSPB and complete the work needed in this field guide over the next couple of years. So I decided, when Adam was one and half and with Tanya in part-time work, to take the plunge and become a freelance illustrator."

The decision was taken in 1991, he handed in his notice and stayed in Bedfordshire for a year while working on the book before moving to Roselands in Paignton.
Much of his work while in Bedfordshire involved studying the skins of birds held in museum collections.

"It is not like looking at stuffed birds. These are specimens collected in Victorian times, and it is remarkable they still retain their colour and details and their feathers were still intact and not falling to bits. So I would look at these skins for the detailed plumage of the birds, but it didn't help to try to catch the character of the birds because nowadays books rely as much on capturing what they call the 'jizz', or the character of the bird, as well as showing the plumage details and the characteristics.

"I collected as much detail as I could from Tring Museum, from photographs, illustrations and drawings. Obviously I had been to Yemen and made sketches of endemic species and species which had not been seen anywhere else."

With friends he toured around Turkey, right out to the Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian borders, catching up with the many of the species he was illustrating for the book.

"I didn't have a camera with me so I was sketching for two and a half weeks, drawing something every time I saw one of my target species. I built up a couple of note books full of illustrations of birds with sketches and notes, which I would illustrate later.

"Two and half years later all the illustrations were finished, the book was published, and I was over the moon to see a book like that on the shelves with my name on the front cover. My earlier booklet for the Yemen had only been seen in that country and this was the first time I had illustrated a major book on my work and there was my name on it. It could be bought by bird-watchers anywhere in the world who would be travelling to the Middle East.

"There are Middle East versions of it now but at the time it was very much a British book, which was sold around the world. When it was first published, although there were a few problems in the Middle East in the early 1990s there was nothing like there is now and the area was a very popular destination for birdwatchers and the book did quite well.

"I think field guides from around the world are something birdwatchers would tend to collect, especially as some of the birds in the Middle East occasionally turn up on local shores, so they would buy a book like that because of the information they could not find anywhere else."

There are plans for a second edition and Mike said: "I am quite pleased about that because when I look back at some of those paintings I did all those years ago, I think 'I can do better than that'. So I am looking forward to getting cracking on that and that is my priority task for the next year."

Mike contributes work as voluntary art editor for the Devon Bird Watching and Preservation Society for which he was bird recorder from 1996 to 2002 and is due to do the job again this year.

He was born in Plymouth in 1962 and moved to Paignton at five years old when his father came to work at the STC telecom company, later Nortel. He lived at Foxhole all his childhood and went to the nearby primary school, was a pupil at Paignton School, now the community college, starting at Borough Road and later moving to the Waterleat Road sites. He was encouraged in his interest by teachers and he was put in touch with the then education officer at Paignton Zoo.

"My teachers said my paintings were good but they would be better if I was sketching straight from nature. I was told at the zoo I would never make 'a David Shepherd', which was right, but I was told I had got a talent. In some ways that could have put me down I suppose, but it encouraged me to work harder and harder at my painting."

Every weekend he went to the zoo to sketch the animals and birds from life rather than copy from books or magazines. "I think at that stage, even at 15 in the middle of GCSEs, I really knew that I wanted to develop a career in birds and art," he said. "It was during A levels that I realised it was really the artistic side I wanted to go down. I went to what was Torquay Technical College, now the South Devon College, to do a foundation course in arts."

On his return to Torbay years later he worked from a garden studio at home in Roselands.

"If there is a book project then that is a lot of work and a big commitment and may take six to seven months to finish, but in the meantime I will still have lots of other clients, so I will be working for magazines which every couple of months will want an illustration. I have that commitment on-going all the time as well as working on interpretive material for nature centres.

"If you look around Torbay I have done most of the artwork down at The Seashore Centre at Goodrington, murals at Living Coasts, I have worked at Dawlish Warren, and I am working at Stover at the moment. You have to be disciplined. Being self-employed it is very easy to get distracted."

From Roselands he moved to Goodrington where he has a studio in the house. "My children are older and there isn't the disruption there would have been when they were younger. But you still have to be disciplined and most of my work has a deadline and a schedule to meet. I have never missed one. A book may be a year ahead, but most jobs for magazines will be in a few weeks' time."

He says he still does a lot of work for the RSPB and says almost every single bird illustration on the organisation's websites are his, but they are being updated all the time.

"I did a lot back in the early 90s and I have been updating those. My style has changed and the RSPB have been adding to the website. When they first started the illustrations would just be a male and female of the species. Now they are looking at winter plumage and juveniles, and they are adding to it all the time.

"For books and magazines I use a mixture of watercolour and a medium called gouache, which is a slightly more opaque water colour, which you can paint over with pale colours. That is a quicker and easier way to work and does not require the discipline of water colour. If I am working on murals I use acrylic paints and domestic household paints like emulsions and glosses."

Computers and technology hold a promising future for Mike who is building up a database of illustrations which can be used by anybody at anytime through his own website.

"These are my paintings which have been scanned by professionals and cleaned up so basically it is a bird on a white background. Over the years I have been adding more and more illustrations to this bird bank, which people, authorities, magazines can use, and it is a way of producing work which is my copyright which people can use at any time for a fee.

"I know that however much I work, and enjoy doing it, I am never going to be a rich person. I really haven't got a clue how many birds I have painted. I have illustrated books and done 1,500, to 2,000 birds, perhaps more than that. Although publishers commission the work, usually the copyright is retained by the artist-illustrator and is returned. Those illustrations I cut up and frame them as small originals.

"Books are not the be-all-and-end-all. I have thoroughly enjoyed working on the nature centres and murals. It is very different. One day I am working on a book illustration which is only an inch square requiring needle fine paintbrush, the next I am out at Living Coasts doing a mural with a nine-inch roller, and that is the nice thing, the variety."

Article courtesy of the Herald Express at www.thisissouthdevon.co.uk

Photo courtesy of the Western Morning News at www.thisiswesternmorningnews.co.uk