Recently we were in the Seattle Aquarium and while Nancy was photographing the yearling sea otter, I spent some time in the tidal tank area with my sketchbook. This is one of my favorite Seattle-places, almost as good as the Woodland Park Zoo. I’ve spent hours in here drawing and just watching life go on in the big salt water exhibits. So, from that came this little sketch showing the community of critters that live there on one of the pilings. This is all raw ocean water that gets piped into the aquarium, and it’s all unfiltered so much of the marine life comes in naturally. As I was drawing this, I realized everything in front of me was either trying to eat everyone else, or trying to just hide so as to not be eaten. What a scary place to live – so I wrote about it for my monthly story in 48-North magazine.

And here’s my original sketch before I added watercolor to it as an underlay. Lets see: plumose anemones, kelp crabs, pile perch, acorn barnacles, ochre star, little brown barnacles and a hermit crab or two. Got it!

And just in case you missed it last week, here’s our newest puzzle, “A Walk on the Wild Side” for Fort Townsend State Park, the old-growth forest park near us here on the Olympic Peninsula. Check it out here on the website. And thanks, everyone, for the initial interest in this new interpretive puzzle. Very gratifying.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to. And you can follow me on Facebook where I just posted a new hiking album.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.