I left this at a pretty large size on the web, so if you click on it, you’ll see the enlarged version and all the details.

A few weeks ago I blogged about our field trip to Point Reyes National Seashore and the painting I’m doing for them. Now, here’s my sketch, and Jane at Harpers Ferry Center already mocked it up into the design for the park map so I can see where I need to move things around to fit the text. Vultures below the text, some branches trimmed off a little. The painting itself will hang in the Bear Valley Visitor Center, but funding for it is coming from this park brochure project. I think it’s going to be a pretty lush and vibrant painting. With luck we’ll have some support stuff like posters and puzzles to offer of the painting by next summer.

Some of have askd how I come up with these designs. Do I just copy the real place and add some critters? Well, above is the main reference photo I went by, so you can judge for yourself. It was pretty foggy so some of it was just guesswork, but if you compare this with the sketch, and then the concept drawing below I did on location, you can see how far these things change from my field hiking to field sketchbooking, to the beginnings of paint. That headland in the upper left distance is actually turned around the other way and much more distant in reality – the big bay, Drake’s Estero, is also farther away. All that actually moved back in the final sketch, and the cypress got bigger. Artistic license – or call it surgery to make a better painting. Push and pull, elements get moved until they finally settle in a place they should have been in the first place. I just didn’t know it when I began.

Thanks for reading this week. My big painting for the Polks Nature Center in Florida is so close to being finished I can taste the celebratory wine on my tongue. I’ll show it to you next week.

Oh, and we were forced to build a competely new web shopping cart over the past few weeks, so please bear with us if all the products aren’t up yet. Don’t worry, the puzzles are there at least, and a few posters, but if you want something that’s not there, just email us. Playing webmaster is not one of my favorite jobs.

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.