A Larger Painting today.We’ve added some names from Gallery Nine in Port Townsend, so if you’re getting this email and don’t know what it is, this is the weekly art-blog for painter-writer Larry Eifert. Don’t want it? Just unsubscribe below. I sent it about once a week.

North Fork of the Sol Duc River. Now this is a special place. No one goes here because the trail doesn’t GO anywhere and today’s peak-bagging goal-oriented hikers  hate that. No lake, no peak, no stunning overlook – just miles and miles of stately old-growth forest and rushing river awaiting. Elk, deer, salmon – and lots of dippers like this one.

The Sol Duc is about 70 miles west of here in Olympic National Park. After hiking over a hill for about a mile from the Sol Duc road, we put on our water shoes and forded the river that was up to our thighs. Cold – but absolutely delightful – and these two natural barriers are what also help to keep most hikers out. On the other side, with hiking boots back on, we ambled up the trail beside the river. Sometimes we were down on bedrock, other times up in maple glades festooned with hanging club moss and occasionally up onto deeply forested benches with enormous trees. There’s a lot of bedrock basalt exposed along the river, creating punchbowl effects and some very deep pools (like the painting). It’s a place to just sit and listen to the endless harmonies of water over stones, wind high in the 300′ hemlocks – and think about how lucky it is we still  have these places.

Click the images to enlarge them.

This original painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 22″ x 28″ and is offered for $790 unframed.
We can custom frame this for you in any style you’d like using our wholesale framing discounts (meaning you’ll save about 75% of what a normal custom framer would charge).  This is the original painting, NOT a print. However, we offer custom prints as large as 50 inches on the shortest side.
Email us for details in your interested.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was published to.

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.

(You can click on the image to enlarge it.)

Recently, I was commissioned to make a custom canvas print of this painting. It was an interesting process that I want to share.

The original acrylic (in my hands) is only 14″ x 20″, and thankfully I still owned it. This would not have been as easy if I had to ship it back from an owner in, say, Florida. I scanned it in four pieces at 350% and high resolution on my flatbed scanner, pieced it back together in Photoshop, and then carefully cleaned it up at great magnification. It finished out at over 800mbs uncompressed, or MORE than an entire CD’s worth of data in one file. How much is all that? It would mean each person in the country could have about 2.5 pieces of this image with some left over.

My printer-guy, ColorOne in Seattle, said: “just send it over via the web.” Never sent so large a file, mainly because our funky Internet company here can’t even bill us properly, but I compressed it to 577mb and there it went with a button push and the finger’s crossed. FIVE HOURS AND TWENTY TWO MINUTES LATER it made it to someplace in cyberspace. Probably took five minutes to download it over in Seattle, 40 miles away, but they got it in one piece - and matched the colors perfectly. The resolution is so good on the canvas that it’s difficult to tell it’s not an a real painting, and it has a varnished finish like an glazed oil. Amazing technology – and the folks at ColorOne are very good at . Let’s see. The side of a bus for the next one?

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

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.

If you just hate this stuff and want to unsubscribe, just hit the return button and let me know.

We were in Glacier National Park recently, enjoying the trails before all the tourists arrived. Late one afternoon we were looping around Swiftcurrent Trail and coming back into Many Glacier and the campground – and came into a very pleasant aspen grove. Now, we have aspen here at home too, just a few that are stragglers probably from the North Cascades, but this was a really old grove. Aspens usually grow in avalanche chutes where they have little competition. They all bond together with a common root system that helps stop the winter snow’s attempts to yank them out. Because of the avalanches, they grow all contorted and never get very big, but here was a bottomland grove of beautiful large trees. It was like strolling beneath a golden yellow canopy of fluttering confetti. Lovely.

This watercolor and ink painting is on paper, 8.5″ x 12.5″ and $125 unframed.
A nice dark mahogany frame with a double mat makes it a total of $150 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

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.

Sundown on Olympic National Park’s Hoh River.Yes, I’m still finishing up stuff I began while sitting in the lawn chair beside the Hoh River – and why not, it’s a great place. This way I get to experience it twice. And this amazing evening color wouldn’t repeat itself every day. Someone once asked me if I ever did hard drugs in my early days. Nope, I painted. I thought it was better in every way. On the other hand, I AM a child of the 60′s, and, well, you know. …

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas board, 9″ x 12″ and $125 unframed.
The gold or mahogany frame with a linen liner makes it a total of $150 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. Right now, this painting is in a dark frame with a linen liner behind it, sitting in Gallery Nine in Port Townsend. It’s also a bit more if you buy it there.

This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details if you’re interested.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

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.

I really liked these trees, and they were right there in the campground, so, of course the paints came out of their box. Red alder is a tree that likes streamsides and damp areas and many times they’ll come in after logging until young conifers take over – like they did here. I think they’re very beautiful trees, with various and interesting bark patterns any painter of nature would find interesting. Red alders don’t live very long - they’re old at 50 - and those rare older ones become very gnarly and shapely, bruised and battered by winter storms.

I tend to get lost in the details, so after this initial sketch was drawn, I turned the chair around so I could paint them in my mind’s eye (with considerably less detail).  There are other alder species here in the West – white alder, Sitka, mountain, speckled and several more, but red alder always have leaves that curl under just slightly along the edges.

This mixed media painting is watercolor and ink on paper, 9″ x 12″ and $125 unframed.
A dark mahogany frame with a double mat makes it a total of $150 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

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.