These past few days I’ve been doing some interesting illustrations for Good Old Boat magazine. Graphite and watercolor, not what I normally do – and that made it all the more fun. Author John Vigor provided an interesting article about sailboat cruising and the birds he’s seen from Western Canada to the South Atlantic and beyond. I know, it’s a fairly broad subject, eh? I was given a pretty broad list of choices to illustrate, so I picked the most interesting birds to me. Above are a pair of tufted puffins, local guys for sure – in fact, this pair could be within five miles of our place.

Next on the list was this little guy:

This is a St. Helena wirebird. St. Helena, if you remember, is in the southern Atlantic and is one of the most remote places on the planet. It’s where they put Napoleon after they named an ice cream for him – and maybe also because he started a war (George, the house is now vacant). The wirebird is the island’s only surviving endemic bird, and having never painted it, I just had to do some research (which is the real fun part of this stuff) and try it out. It’s a killdeer-like plover that does a broken wing act just like our local birds here.

There were more, but you’ll have to wait for the May issue to see them – which I’ll post here if I can remember. It was a most interesting project, for no other reason than in one day I got to paint birds from opposite ends of the planet.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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