Tag Archives: Murals

Posts about other stuff

A New Website For Me – Oh Boy

Eifert-front-page

See it here at LarryEifert.com

I’ve probably spent too much time messing with this instead of painting, but I now have a new website, completely redesigned, lots of new stuff, lots of little interesting corners with new content. And with a total of around 390 pages and posts, things were getting messy with the old one – so, I spent some time over the holidays tearing it apart and rebuilding a more modern version.

 

This one is ‘responsive’, meaning it looks good on your phone and tablet, pc and laptop – all of them at once if you have eight eyes. It still has the shopping cart with all the goodies like the puzzles, but there are new travel albums, 24 pages of murals and park projects that are better laid out. Better search capabilities are there too.  That’s Nancy lurking behind all the backgrounds, she comes, she goes, up and down some of our favorite local trails.

Smaller-Wildlife-Paintings

All my weekly posts are here too – might make a good book someday. There are over 300 of them. The comments are still closed until I can find a better spam screening, but that’s coming soon.

I finally got all the recent smaller paintings into albums there that can be seen as slideshows. There’s a lot of content that’s never been seen like this. Again, here’s the link, but it’s still just larryeifert.com.

Thanks for reading this week. Send this to someone who might appreciate what I’m painting and tell them to sign up. I’m trying to expand my list. An email will work.
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. We’re redesigning her site too – so check it out.

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

New Painting Post

Whidbey Island Prairie – Spring and Early Summer

Spring-prairie-progress

Work in progress: a new painting on it’s way. Click the image and it should enlarge in your browser.

Unveiling of an almost-finished new project today. I’ve been working on this for some time and it’s closing in on completion. Thought I’d toss it out for comments. I still have some bit to go, like adding another layer of closeup grasses and sedge, refining some of the flowers and critters – just tightening it up.

Nancy
Nancy at the prairie – pack strapped on full of camera gear for reference shots.

This is the sixth painting for the Whidbey Camano Island Land Trust and it will eventually be an outdoor wayside panel “planted” in a piece of rare natural prairie they’ve recently acquired. It’s right along the bluff in the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve – and in the background you can see Port Townsend and the Olympic Peninsula. So what’s the big deal here? It’s rare natural prairie, yes, but also a place with some very interesting and rare plants, like the Golden Paintbrush. And the site is only one of a handful where this beautiful plant grows. While it grows here naturally, the Land Trust is actively adding thousands of new plants or all types to jump start that’s already here. It’s a massive undertaking I’m continually impressed with – and I can’t even mow my own grass on a timely basis.

Nancy1
At the plant nursery where the Land Trust is supplementing thousands of new plants to help the prairie regain its original ecosystem. It’s a long haul that will take years.

This is the first of two of these prairie paintings. Stay tuned – I’ll send out photos of this one upon completion, and keep you in the loop for the second. It’s a very fun project for me.

Thanks for reading this week. Send this to someone who might appreciate what I’m painting and tell them to sign up. I’m trying to expand my list. An email will work.

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.

New Painting Post

A New Eifert Puzzle of Old-growth Forests

12764 Old-growth Puzzle

Not just the paintings, but I also do all the designs for our stuff, puzzles, posters, books – you name it – the go-fer guy. I figure if I painted the thing, I should be able to transfer some of the same ideas to the rest of it. So, after talking with a bunch of puzzlers, I worked on this new design with a better understanding of what makes an interesting and somewhat difficult jigsaw puzzle. Add to this the box with a species list, key and a bunch of stuff about ancient old-growth forests, and I think this is a winner. Lots of layers of color and texture, lots to look at, and many pieces that could go anywhere. I think it should be an entertaining and educational product – and you may learn a few things about these forests in the process.

Just in time for the approaching holidays, this week we received a giant load and our warehouse is stuffed. The details: 500-pieces, finished size is nearly 18″ x 24″, and the box is 9″ x 12″. You can order it now on our website here.

Old-growth-box-front


Email us for details.

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.

New Painting Post

Badlands Jigsaw Puzzle – Now Available

Badlands-18x24-puzzle

Finally, our summer load of new puzzles have arrived, and Badlands National Park might prove to be a real winner. By my count (somewhat fuzzy) this is somewhere around the 80th jigsaw puzzle we’ve developed or licensed from my paintings. The original mural is installed at the main Visitor Center in Badlands National Park in South Dakota. What, you say? You even have work in South Dakota? Yes, and this painting was done to commemorate the release back into the wild of the black-footed ferret, a native hunter important to that prairie ecosystem.

 

This is the box back, chocked full of enough critters to fill a field guide.

12762-Badlands-puzzle-box-bottom

 

 

And here’s a detail showing you what color carpet we have (just in case you want to know these things). The main thing is to know these are now available, because I received a bunch of emails requesting such things. You can order them here from the website store.

 

 

Eifert-Badlands-12762-box

All the other available puzzles are there too.
Email us for details if you’d like.

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 or see what she’s currently offering in the WEBSITE STORE.

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

New Painting Post

Final Designs for the Whidbey Island Land Trust

Rare-Diverse-Forest

Not just a nice painting, but an entire outdoor art gallery! This wayside panel goes to ‘press’ this week, so here’s the final design. Forest path, old-growth forest on the cliff, windblown ancient trees and a complex ecosystem – all in one painting. Since the text talks of this forest, we put in eight smaller paintings of the local trees and shrubs, so the art becomes a nature guide. Click to enlarge in your browser.

This will be fabricated out of very thick high-pressure laminated ‘plastic’ resin and cardboard with a lifespan certainly longer than mine. An art gallery in the forest – just my idea of where art should be shown.

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.

New Painting Post

New Life for an Old Painting – Arcata Marsh, CA

Arcata-MarshIn the 1990’s I was commissioned to paint this wildlife mural for the City of Arcata, California’s marsh project. A fairly innovative idea at the time, they were using old log sorting ponds to purify their sewer water, using them for settling ponds. Of course, being Arcata which is mostly Humboldt State University, it involved wildlife, and lots of it – and so a visitor center was built and this painting is an exhibit there, but it’s inside the building.

Now, two decades later, they’re using the same image as their entrance sign at the gate, so I did a redesign last week and it’s at the fabricator now. This simply wouldn’t have been possible back when I first painted the image, but nowadays I can digitally create this huge sign, send it off over the cable – and soon this beautiful,  6′ x 6′ and 3/4″ thick, it’s going to be made out of something like Formica – with a life span longer than I’ll be alive.

Arcata-marsh-installed

Of course, this is all possible because I retained the copyrights to this painting, so when Denise at the Marsh wanted to do this project, she needed to come to me. It’s a way we working artists make a living. I only signed away the rights to one large painting – the first one I ever did for the National Park Service at Redwood National Park. It ended badly, with me having to actually buy my own posters from the parks’ bookstores and not even having a digital copy of it to put on my website. A cautionary tale, don’t you think?

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.

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.

New Painting Post

Sugar Pine Point – Lake Tahoe and Climate Change

General-Creek-2014

Some years ago I was commissioned for two paintings of Sugar Pine Point State Park, a park that has two miles of Lake Tahoe’s forested coastline and one of the most pristine creeks to enter that lake. Fun project, I got to go there and poke around. The images were eventually made into outdoor wayside panels, and the originals are in the visitor center – pretty typical. We made lots of book store products from the images, and now the poster of General Creek has been redesigned and will soon be available.

For me, the real story is on the poster’s backside, and it’s possibly more important than first version the first time around. I rewrote the essay, and I was struck how the theme, the story, the very reason for this poster and painting has changed in just one short decade. I finished it up, sat back and breathed a ‘WOW’ to myself. Here’s the thing. The original essay spoke of each of the critters, plants and everything else that lives here as being no more important than any of the others. That’s nature’s way, after all. And it went on to say humans were no better nor worse too.

And the updated text? It now speaks of human-caused Climate Change, proving I was wrong about that last sentence. Nature will survive here, of course, but in what form we can’t yet say. Will this ecosystem still be in harmony with itself? I suspect not. Will General Creek, the main focus of this painting, still be flowing in summer when the critters need it most? Doubtful. We just don’t know, but we can guess. In my final statement, I say this: Climate Change is now effecting this landscape, which will alter what we see here in many ways – and add to the stress on a fragile place. In the future, this painting of General Creek may become a historic record of what once was.

Eifert_General_Creek
The original wayside panel beside General Creek.

All of a sudden I realized that all these large-scale murals I’ve been creating for the past several decades might become something more than their original intent. I thought they were painted to educate people about what’s here. As human-caused climate change evolves, now I see these images might be about what once was. A scary thought, for sure, but maybe one that’s more valuable and long lasting.

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.

New Painting Post

A Rare and Diverse Forest – Whidbey Land Trust

Forest-ecology-sketch

A click will enlarge this in your browser. 

This is the second painting for the Whidbey Camano Land Trust project at the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve just a few miles north of Port Townsend. Missed the first painting? Click here. This time it’s less about the critters and more about showing this rare and diverse forest, a remnant lowland bit of old-growth hugging a bluff-top. This place gets the full unfettered west wind coming right down the Straits, so the trees on the edge are wildly “flagged” from centuries of being blasted by the Westerlies. Eagles and hawks patrol this bluff edge, riding these updrafts that also increase the wind’s velocity. Weeesheeeh, can you hear it?  Then there’s the trail snaking along, a left-over from when this was part of Fort Casey where they watched and waited for an enemy that never showed up. Farther inland, the trees are huge and less flagged, but still very gnarly. In fact, they have some of the gnarliest branches I’ve seen around Puget Sound. They’re trees you’d expect on the western beaches at Kalaloch or La Push instead of here, 100 miles to the east. Trees and wind, trees and wind. It’s a fun painting for me so far.

Rare-1

And here’s my progress so far. An old friend wrote last week to say he thought when my larger paintings reach this stage, it  was about as good as it gets – free and dramatic, non-objective nirvana. I completely agree. It’s not that the finished paintings are less good, just a different good. I could end it here, show it in some gallery for a month and maybe it’d be hung in some rich-guys house. But if I continue to paint it, thousands upon thousands will see it for decades to come – so I paint on.

Rare-2

Here’s some structure appearing – blocking out trees and distant horizon, the Olympic Peninsula in the distance.

Rare-3

And now the trail is defined, some parts are refined a bit so I can judge how it’s going to come together. Background horizon is finished enough that I can understand how much atmosphere there might be to make it appear distant. Painters out there: see how light that is! Just saying. Stay tuned, because given some time, by next week this should be well along – oh, but then there’s the magazine page I have to write, a new puzzle that needs proofing, a web site to build for Crater Lake Institute – and a spring to enjoy.

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.

New Painting Post

Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve – Forest Wildlife mural

Forest-Wildlife

Click the image and it will enlarge in your browser.

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?

Forest-animals-sketch

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.

New Painting Post

Progress Report – Whidbey Wildlife

I often get emails about blogging progress reports of these larger paintings. Someday I’ll set my camera up and do a little film of it, start to finish. This painting has some degree of pressure with the calendar, in other words, no time to mess around. So here’s a little progress report in a couple of photos.

 

Wildlife-4

Click the images to enlarge them in your browser.

Top image is how it’s looking this morning. Many things get in the way of painting the hours I need to put in, like new spring printed projects, puzzle redesigns, trying to find resource material for the other four paintings – but it’s moving along well. Last week I blogged about the sketch and an overview of the entire project here.
Wildlife-1

And here’s a couple of days ago. Background’s in place so I can begin defining the foreground’s details, critters, closeups that take the time. There have already been major changes in that area, but only I will know.Forest-animals-sketch

And here’s the original sketch I showed last week. Thanks, Mark and Jessica at the Whidbey Camano Land Trust for making this a very fun project. I don’t often get the chance to paint these complex murals of my backyard forest, but this project comes close.

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.