Tag Archives: Old-growth Forests

Jigsaw Puzzles, Murals, New Painting Post

Shouting Out: Four New Jigsaw Puzzles now available

All these puzzles are available in our secure webstore with the others, same price $18.95 each and $4.99 shipping on as many as you can buy in one order to one address. 

Shouting out, because we didn’t have ANY summer puzzle season since all National Park Visitor Centers were closed – you know, where most people buy our puzzles!

But now: Just in time for the holidays, we have four new puzzles. And not just new puzzles, but new designs, smaller boxes for easier storing and mailing as gifts, and a free reference poster included in each one. The reference poster makes it easy for two people to work on a puzzle at once, and each can have a reference image (the box and the poster). The boxes are now about 60% of the size of the old ones, but the puzzles are still 500-pieces, 18″ x 24″ finished size, same sized pieces and clean cuts on the pieces. It’s a nice improvement, and we’re aiming to remake all our puzzles like this as titles run out.

Puzzle pieces in a bag, reference poster, box top and interpretive stuff on the box back. Species list and even my ink drawings on the box sides.

Olympic High Country is a painting that’s never been seen or used before for a puzzle. It was painted because this place means a lot to me, and those rare endemic animals and flowers of our local mountains are really interesting. It’s a good image for a puzzle. Here’s the link to the puzzle in the store.

Killer Whales of the Salish Sea

I painted this Orca Whales image for a park on San Juan Island, and the complexity of the background instantly made it a candidate for a jigsaw puzzle. Here’s the link to this one in our store.

Two Sides of the Sea

A new design of our best-selling image. This colorful mural is now enhanced with the reference poster and smaller box, just like the others.

Old-growth Forests of the Pacific Northwest

The fourth image is a redesign of my Mount Rainier mural at the Ohanapecosh Visitor Center on the southeast side of the park. We’re at the end of our run and thought we’d start fresh with this instead of just reprinting it. Same reference poster and smaller box as the others. The detail in the foreground makes for a really complex and entertaining puzzle that’ll keep you up all night.

All these puzzles are available in our secure webstore with the others, same price $18.95 each and $4.99 shipping on as many as you can buy in one order to one address.  Again, here’s the link to all four in our store, plus the others everyone seems to love.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

New Painting Post

Royal Basin Trail – Into the Light

Royal-Basin---Into-the-Light

We recently hiked this glorious trail, and I always love to relive good times by painting them. Miles of old-growth forest in a mature western hemlock forest, trails going off in various directions to alpine places of glorious solitude, the sounds of the Dungeness River always in ear-shot. It’s a special place we go to often. So here’s a little painting expressing that. If I die tomorrow and walk into the Light, this is how I hope it will be.

Royal-Basin-Into-Light_framed

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 6″ x 8″ and $145 custom framed with a triple mat and glass. The glass size is 11″ x 14″ and outside measurements are 14″ x 17″.
Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
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

Old-growth Forest Poster Is Now Available

We’ve now printed my Mount Rainier National Park mural as a 18″x 24″ poster. I spent some time on a different type of design for this, with a really great interpretive key on the back. We’ve already had orders from several big parks, so I’m feeling this is going to work.

Awhile ago, I got to thinking about how posters are used. Hang them up, you can’t see the back, all that backside space lost to the viewers. So, I reworked this to make it so anyone can slam it on a copy machine and get four full sheets of the back that create a nice teaching guide and interpretive key. I’m hoping classes use this, but also people who just want to use the painting as a field guide reference.

The poster back is sectioned off so teachers can photocopy each of four panels and create a lesson plan.

And here’s the original painting installed in Mount Rainier National Park. It’s in the main room filled with oiled wood trim and cedar walls, and seems to fit almost like it’s in an art gallery, but guess what, it’s CLOSED because of the SEQUESTER. It’s the nicest visitor center (I think) at that world-class park, and so why would this great country just shut this off, board it up and not allow people to use it at the very busiest season? Let’s see, by doing this, it might staff cuts (people out of work and on unemployment), the non-profit there can’t sell books (meaning private publishers loose money and therefore pay fewer taxes) and artists (us) loose income to pay our printer and and therefore pay fewer taxes.

But while you may not be able to buy this poster at the Ohanapecosh Visitor Center, you CAN get them from us. Here’s a direct link to our shopping cart. 18″ x 24″ poster for $8.95 each. Help us pay the bill that Mount Rainier’s Ohanapecosh would have helped with!

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog.  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 photographs

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

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.