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Feeling pretty good about this painting, and that’s saying something for me (who’s usually a real curmudgeon about my own stuff). With several more paintings right behind this one, I didn’t hesitate to finish it up this week. Some details need to be refined, a couple of  minor changes I can already see, but we’re close – very close.

This is all about wildlife in the forest, so I designed it to show the actual trail meandering down and around the viewer. It’s as if YOU were back in the woods with all the critters, watching hikers come and go, come and go. The coyote shares the trail with people as I often see them doing (they can cover a lot of ground that way), a Douglas squirrel shucks a Douglas-fir cone, a chickadee lands on an old uprooted snag. I enjoy piecing this together, one critter at a time, and hopefully in the end it all makes sense. The critters should all be sized relative to each other, spaced in such ways that might really be true. I still need to alter the rose color, fix the shine on the squirrel, a couple of other things – and, well, what do you know, just this moment I realized I forgot the deer mouse in the old stump. Back to the easel! Next time you see this painting, look for it.

And here’s the sketch again, finished just 13 days ago. I’m telling you, I’m on fire! Can you see the deer mouse?

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

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