Tag Archives: Interpretive Panels

New Painting Post

One Tree Moment for Ballard Nature Center

I still have the color to add on the five little insets, but I think this project of interpretive art is looking so good right now I wanted to share it.

It’s a very small world! I was asked by Genesis Graphics in Escanaba, Michigan if I’d be interested in doing some watercolor and ink paintings for the Ballard Nature Center in Effingham, Illinois. (So, if we did a conference call, that would be a 4000-mile round trip triangle for the words to be heard by everyone involved.) I’ve had a long and fine relationship with the folks at Genesis, and they always let me just do my thing without a bunch of hoops to jump through. My reply on this idea was, “Oh, I know where Effingham, Illinois is. My formative years were spent  just a few miles to the west in Springfield. I learned my stuff in the Illinois State Museum where I was spoon-fed nature and art by the staff and my parents.” This was relayed to the Ballard folks and it turns out two of my mom’s books are in their visitor center library. What a small world, and very soon they’ll have two generations of Eifert work there.

I know everyone likes to see the ‘behind the scenes’ stuff, so to show you how far this design was refined, here’s the concept sketch.

 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.

New Painting Post

Reprinting the Arcata Marsh Mural

This was only the third big habitat mural I ever painted, and I’m  hard-pressed to figure out the date it was finished. I’d say 1989, give or take, but it could be earlier. A printed copy of this painting lives in Arcata, California at the Arcata Marsh Interpretive Center. Its home is a sunny wall, and for that the reason we installed a copy of the painting and not the original. Now because of sun damage it’s about to have version #3 printed to replace #2.

So, this week I went into the giant lock box at the bank and fished through the hundreds of 8″ x 10″ transparencies (film they don’t even make any more) and brought this home for scanning. A decade ago was the last time we replaced this, and then we used that transparency and simply made a photo blowup. This time it’s all digital and will be printed on half-inch thick high-pressure laminate material similar to Formica. Thinking about this I was truly struck by the technical changes of this stuff in the past decade, and how artists really need to understand and keep up with it – or risk being left behind like so many other ‘industries’ – and I’ll be damned if they’re going to outsource ME to India!

When I painted this, the Arcata Marsh was a very new place, and it was difficult to imagine what it would become. Sitting on an old log processing pond at the upper end of Humboldt Bay, the idea was for the nearby sewer plant to run its almost clean water through a series of channels and let aquatic plants clean up the last of it. Birds would flock, animals would find homes, people would come to walk and view – and over the years it all came true. I’m happy to have been a part of the initial interpretation, and happy they continue to kept my painting as part of it.

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.

New Painting Post

My New Portfolio Is Ready To Erupt

For some years now I have had a cd Powerpoint portfolio I send to clients, parks and contractors who give me these great commissions painting nature. Keeping the thing current has always been a challenge, but nothing like I used to deal with back in the dark days when things weren’t digital. It’s a great way to present what I might do for future projects or references of what I have painted, printed and produced. I also had a second disk for some of my easel paintings that was wildly out of control, so recently I’ve been working on a new version of all of it. This new one is a composite of both portfolios, and at 147 pages, it’s almost a book. I’ve also put it all together into one big presentation and divide it into clickable sections with a Table of Contents for easy viewing. So, there are murals, wayside exhibits, big walls, dainty ink drawings, watercolors, acrylic paintings on canvas, publications and other stuff like jigsaw puzzles and posters, nature guides and tours – the works, and all on one little disk.

 

It’s now ready to fly, so if you’re a park interpreter, design firm for nature interpretation and installations, past client or just interested in a copy (free) to have ‘just in case’, I can now mail one out to you. Just hit the reply key and give me the scoop, but please, no requests from my easel painting collectors. Sorry, but how much time do I have for this when I’d rather be painting?

 

And, a brand new 500-piece jigsaw puzzle is coming out this week, so stay tuned, oh my many faithful puzzle people. This one is of the mural I painted for Kenai Fjords National Park in Seward, Alaska. It shows the ecosystem emerging from the melting toe of Exit Glacier, and the only other place you’re going to be able to buy it is at the new Visitor Center there or through Alaska Geographic. So, it’s either a luxury cruise, a long flight and a rented car, OR, you’ll be able to get it from us! Come to think of it, options one and two don’t sound all that bad.

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.

New Painting Post

Glacier Bay Old-growth

Keeping it going, this week was spent working on five smaller paintings for Glacier Bay National Park. Nancy says I tend to loose track of obligations, appointments and schedules, well, try keeping five paintings with lots of details all on track. Ah, priorities! It’s like juggling. This one is a purely fictitious place but based on reality. The landscape around the Visitor Center and Lodge at Glacier Bay National Park is fresh from the ice and its forests are still pretty young. It will likely be changed before it’s finished, but my task here was to paint what WILL be there eventually if the forest there continues to evolve as it should. If things go according to one option in nature’s normal plan, this will become a western hemlock-dominated forest, a few huge trees, logs almost completely covered with moss, skunk cabbage and devils club. Everything would be green filtered light as if you’re inside an emerald. Did I get it?

Here’s the first-draft concept sketch.

And below is the second draft before I started painting. It’s still very different from the final painting, but the elements are taking shape. In the end, the huckleberries left, devils club and skunk cabbage came in after the Park straightened me out. Those two species require more moisture than I had realized was there, so we shifted things around.

I get a fair amount of mail saying that comparing these sketches are the best part of my weekly posts. It’s the ‘inside scoop’ that few see, and I think it’s easy to recognize the fact that the pencil is the painter’s most valuable tool. The second most valuable tool might be that I’m working with two guys from the National Park Service that really care. It’s such a treat for me to have interactions with people who know what their doing, both on the ground with Melenie and Tom at Glacier Bay in Alaska and Chad at Harpers Ferry Center in West Virginia. I just never tire of learning about this stuff, especially from smart people. And that we did a conference call this week featuring a land-line and cel phone joining Alaska to Port Townsend together with a desk’s top in West Virginia is even better.

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.

New Painting Post

Bristlecone Pine Sketchbook Journal

I posted some other pages from this project a few weeks ago here. There are 11 pages of sketches that will string along the bottom of the three mural paintings I also painted, and all these will soon be installed in the new visitor center at the Schulman Grove of ancient bristlecone pines in California. When it opens in a few months, this is going to be really fun to see, at least I hope so. Standing in front of the three huge paintings, these sketchbook panels will show how the paintings were developed, like a field sketchbook.

I’ve always loved field sketching. It gets to the heart of things, of using your eyes to see. You get to watch the results flowing out of your hand like magic. To me, it’s the very basic process of creating art, and something I’ve done all my life. Someone recently asked me if I ever took mind-enhancing drugs. No, I said, instead I draw nature outdoors and in the field, and to do it well requires great attention to details, color, texture and how nature has evolved in a single place. I mean, how much more clearly could a person see this amazing and vibrant world than with a pencil in your hand?

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.

New Painting Post

The Old-growth of Fort Townsend State Park

 

This should enlarge with a click. Please do so as there are lots of details.

Just a mile or so from our studio is one of the rarest of all Northwest places – a lowland old-growth forest. It’s quite a park, and for Nancy and me, just walking the road into this place is often almost spiritual. Here in Port Townsend, we’re on the dry side of the Olympics so these trees aren’t huge like rainforest giants, but there’s an open and ancient feel here that always gets my heart going. Giant glacial boulders dot the forest. Signs of old wildfires are evident. We watch pileated woodpeckers hammer out old snags. Cougar warning signs abound. For about 8,000 years or since the last ice melted, this place has been left to itself. Even when there was a small military garrison here, the only trees cut were a few for firewood.

So, while thousands of miles of forests, our heritage, have been whacked away and the land irreputably ruined, this place has what few lowland forests have these days – some very, very rare plants. All those weird and odd plants that line the painting’s foreground are saprotrophic fungi, plants that don’t produce their own food but instead borrow it from the trees. You won’t see them in cut-over forests – if the forest goes, so goes most of the other stuff like gnome plant, sugar stick and pinedrops. Even calypso orchids won’t reappear. I won’t go into it more here, but I consider this forest to be something of a sacred place, a place much like a world-class museum that holds our most meaningful treasures – our  heritage. These great forests won’t return ever again while humans are here, and so along with the few other scattered lowland patches of old-growth, this is IT!

Somehow the very active local friends group for the park, The Washington State Plant Society, came up with some funding for me to paint a mural for an exhibit at the park. Seriously, I can’t imagine anything more fun for me to do than paint this exceptional forest. I mean this is like a gift, a chance to actually paint my own backyard. It just doesn’t get any better than this. Here’s a picture by Nancy of the ol’ guy at the easel, half way through this effort. Was he dragging his feet? Well, maybe! 

Thanks Ann and Nancy of the friends group, this was just plain fun.

And as usual, 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.

New Painting Post

Fairbanks Alaska Greenbelt

I’ve painted images of city greenbelts before, but nothing like this. In fact, for those of us in the Lower 48 and used to concrete-surrounded greenbelts along city streets, it’s probably difficult to image spruce swamps with moose and sandhill cranes in one. But then this is Fairbanks, Alaska, northern most metro in America. Last week I passed around the first effort with this project – and now here’s the second. Boy, it was fun painting the nature from this far north. Wish I could have gone up for a field trip, but it’s not quite looking like this yet. Thanks to everyone on this project for giving me such free-reign to have some fun.

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. She has some new and wonderful galleries in her album sections.

New Painting Post

Fairbanks Alaska Gets Some Eifert Paintings

This week I finished up two pieces of art for outdoor installations destined for the Chena Flats Greenbelt Project in Fairbanks, Alaska. Lots of mining – lots of messed up watersheds have left this area in need of lots of repair. These paintings are about what I seem to do a lot of these days: show how a landscape MIGHT look if we give it a chance. There are many agencies and non-profits involved in this, but it really seems to be just a small group of involved citizens doing their best to improve their backyard. I’ve been working with a very impressive and diligent woman there who was willing to pare down text and make this look good – and I think together we developed it into a pretty nice piece of interpretation.

And here’s the original, first-draft sketch. Critters came, left, changed – but in the final it’s pretty much like the first idea. That’s how art should be, I think, because the first flash of thought is usually the best. Thanks, Sally.

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.

New Painting Post

Sketchbook of the White Mountains

Click each image to enlarge – there are nice textures here and there.

This week I painted more art for Schulman Grove’s new visitor center in the White Mountains of California. This group is a series of seven sketchbook pages for exhibit panels below my three murals. These three need to be cleaned up a bit, so you’ll see some ragged look and blocky edges here and there from all the Photoshop layers. It’s a work in progress, but this way you can see assembly process.

I hope not, but I may need to move some of the sketches around or change the wording, so I thought it best to create EACH drawing seperately and even the color is seperately layered so it can be changed. Each text passage is put in with Photoshop too, so it can be edited if necessary. I first did the pencil sketch, then put tracing paper over it and painted the color layer. Both were scanned, pieced together and put on a photo image of one of my blank sketchbooks. I think the results look pretty good, like they’re old field sketches drawn on location a century ago. I was shooting for those old botanical illustrations on faded yellow paper, and I think I came close. Once I get approval from the Forest Service, I can clean up the rough edges. The reason I didn’t hand letter the captions is that all this has to be ADA compliant, so the characters have to be an approved font. Ah, the world of public art these days is pretty complex!

Computers can be maddening, but then again they can help produce wonderful results. On the other hand, if I didn’t have a few drawing skills in the first place, none of this would have happened at all, so don’t send me emails about computers replacing artists. They’re just tools, like paint brushes or pencils.

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. She has some new shots of Sequi, the new sea otter she’s been photographing.

New Painting Post

Another Bristlecone Pine Painting

A few weeks ago I posted my three large murals just completed for the new Schulman Grove Visitor Center near Bishop, CA. Now I’m working on some smaller art for interpretive panels for the rest of the building, and this one features a big ol’ gnarly ancient bristlecone tree in pen and ink and acrylic wash. Below is the preliminary sketch so you can see the progression from pencil to finished painting. It’s pretty close!

There are a lot of other people involved in this project besides me, but I seem to rarely express thanks to these folks for the help I get and joy I experience in doing my work. I’m sure not saying I’m any better than anyone else here, just that it takes a bunch of people to make a visitor center. There’s Rosie, the contractor and designer from Georgia, Frank the writer from Marin County, CA, John L and Sheryl H from the Forest Service, as well as Scott and John from the team Rosie’s assembled to get all this accomplished. We’re a bunch of people that are all doing specific jobs to create a beautiful installation on a remote mountaintop in the Great Basin – and I get to do the art. What a deal!

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.