Tag Archives: Dugualla Bay Preserve

Dugualla Bay Preserve

January 25, 2021 Brush Man

Last week I posted the other wayside panel for Dugualla Bay Preserve. This second one shows the dike removed to allow saltwater to refill the old shoreline and provide forage fish and salmon new habitat. The photo below is the ‘cut’ and then below that my reference photos to the crab and mussel habitat, newly formed tidelands full of life.

We found many little crabs in these holes, all snuggled up and giving us the stink-eye.

And below in the main channel, the NEW channel created by breaching the dike, a major mussel bed teaming with life had developed. As soon as I saw this area, I realized THIS was the story for the art – new places for life where there weren’t just a year before.

Here’s the process of developing this panel. I started with a really rough concept sketch, a few blocks with ‘x’s showing where the text overlay might go. It was fairly close to the final design, right out of the box. From this rough draft, you can see the process.

And the final art featured the mussel beds, crab caves and broken dike. A good story.

Thanks to many groups and individuals, I’ve had the wonderful adventure of doing dozens of these Pacific Northwest salmon and orca recovery panels over the past couple of years. Always challenging, always different, it’s been great fun to take a muddy shoreline or messed up culvert and make some art about it. Stay tuned, there’s more on the horizon – a LOT more.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

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Commissioned paintings, New Painting Post, Waysides, Wildlife

Dugualla Flats Preserve

January 18, 2021 Brush Man

Just finishing up two new paintings for outdoor wayside exhibits at Whitbey Island’s Dugualla Bay Preserve. This is another project for the Whidbey Camano Island Land Trust and, as always, it was a pleasure to paint for them.

This recently restored wetland is on both sides of a dike road a few miles north of Oak Bay. One side is fresh water, the other is a salt marsh salmon habitat area. First it was bay, then farmland with nature shut out. Now it’s back to nature. The bay side is very good forage fish and salmon habitat.

This first painting is the freshwater side, a rich habitat of cattails and critters from western toads to trumpeter swan – and I can’t say I’ve ever painted THOSE two in one painting before! The wetlands have water levels that rise and fall with the seasons and on a site visit a few months ago I took some reference shots, not very good as you can see, but somehow I built an interesting painting with what I had.

I started with a quick gesture drawing, a concept sketch showing cattails on the right, map and text on the left, maybe wildlife in the center. It’s sort of amazing to me that the final painting was very close to this.

Then a more refined drawing came with a better understanding how the wildlife fits in, getting their sizes and spatial separations set for a good piece of art. The toad couldn’t be down with the rest of them in the marsh since they’re up in the drier meadows, so I just floated it in midair – a toady blimp.

And this is how the final painting looks. Click on it to enlarge in your browser. These things are certainly not just a nice painting like my days of gallery painting. It takes a bunch of planning to get the other components to all fit.

It all came together with the text, a map I did in Illustrator using the National Park Service’s map software – and the text the Land Trust supplied me. Very skilled efforts go into doing text for these panels and these are really well written. Too many words it becomes a ‘book on a stick’ and no one reads it. Too few words and no one learns anything. And this type of art is all about learning something – which I hope you did with this blog. I hope you liked it.