Tag Archives: Point Reyes National Seashore

Murals, Wildlife

Point Reyes National Seashore

Point-Reyes-final

I think some of you will say “wait a New York minute, I’ve seen this.” True, but this week I was in a client’s office looking at my website on her computer and this painting wasn’t there. Embarrassing.  There were posts of progress, of locations last year, the sketch – but I spaced out the posting of the final version. I keep this stuff on my blog/website for reference, like a catalog – and with almost 500 pages it’s a handful to keep track of. So bear with me while I add this one from last year to it.

If you haven’t seen this place, it’s Point Reyes National Seashore just north of San Francisco. A landscape full of atmosphere and history for me (I’ve hiked it, rode a horse through it, sailed by it in my own boat twice). We arrived at Headquarters and asked what they wanted in the painting. The beach, lighthouse, fog, ocean, redwoods, Doug-fir, Drakes Estuary, Tamales Bay, about 50 sq miles of coastal scrub with all the critters. Nothing to it! The painting hangs in the main visitor center, the back of the new park map features it, and now it’s  here.

Finished map and mural.

finished-maps=web

Labels were added on a draft design that wasn’t used.Point-reyes-labels

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

Closing In – Point Reyes National Seashore

I’m about 80% finished with my current painting for Point Reyes National Seashore. I blogged about the start two weeks ago, and now I’m closing in on completion. There are still many details that need tightening up, filling in, straightening out, smoothing over, brightened or softened, fixed, repainted, moved – but I still call that ‘closing in.’ You can see it’s not finished by the black holes, unpainted treetops, critters just blocked out.

The original painting is going in the Bear Valley Visitor Center at the park, northwest of San Francisco, but it’s also going to be used on their new park map. One entire side of it is the park map, I get the other side. I needed to see how it’s all going to fit that critical space, so Jane at Harper’s Ferry Center in West Virginia (the National Park Service’s interpretive center) popped my painting into the design. The red lines are fold lines.

And here’s that first post so you can see how it’s been developing. The painting is 48″ x 63″. I sort of hit it all over the place to develop a ‘feeling’, which is much different than getting it just ‘painted’. When I look at this progress photo today, I think it’s a bit of history – something no one will ever see again (because it’s painted over). We were at Point Reyes last October for the field research, and it was really flat, dried-up and burnt out colors of nature was getting ready for winter. But Point Reyes has a singular lush greenness that I find very rare and beautiful, and that I’ve brought into the distance. I can’t use the word “unique” because that would mean that no other place on the planet is like it, but let’s just say it’s a ‘singular’ place. It’s a very beautiful landscape to paint.

Thanks for reading this week. I have one more of Virginia’s books up, and a third is almost there. I’ll tell you about them next week unless another painting gets in the way.
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

Point Reyes National Seashore mural sketch

I left this at a pretty large size on the web, so if you click on it, you’ll see the enlarged version and all the details.

A few weeks ago I blogged about our field trip to Point Reyes National Seashore and the painting I’m doing for them. Now, here’s my sketch, and Jane at Harpers Ferry Center already mocked it up into the design for the park map so I can see where I need to move things around to fit the text. Vultures below the text, some branches trimmed off a little. The painting itself will hang in the Bear Valley Visitor Center, but funding for it is coming from this park brochure project. I think it’s going to be a pretty lush and vibrant painting. With luck we’ll have some support stuff like posters and puzzles to offer of the painting by next summer.

Some of have askd how I come up with these designs. Do I just copy the real place and add some critters? Well, above is the main reference photo I went by, so you can judge for yourself. It was pretty foggy so some of it was just guesswork, but if you compare this with the sketch, and then the concept drawing below I did on location, you can see how far these things change from my field hiking to field sketchbooking, to the beginnings of paint. That headland in the upper left distance is actually turned around the other way and much more distant in reality – the big bay, Drake’s Estero, is also farther away. All that actually moved back in the final sketch, and the cypress got bigger. Artistic license – or call it surgery to make a better painting. Push and pull, elements get moved until they finally settle in a place they should have been in the first place. I just didn’t know it when I began.

Thanks for reading this week. My big painting for the Polks Nature Center in Florida is so close to being finished I can taste the celebratory wine on my tongue. I’ll show it to you next week.

Oh, and we were forced to build a competely new web shopping cart over the past few weeks, so please bear with us if all the products aren’t up yet. Don’t worry, the puzzles are there at least, and a few posters, but if you want something that’s not there, just email us. Playing webmaster is not one of my favorite jobs.

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

Point Reyes National Seashore Field Trip

This week Nancy and I were in Point Reyes National Seashore near San Francisco prepping for a new mural. Here’s the concept sketch. It’s been years since I’d been here and it was great to see this beautiful place again. I’ve seen this park from car, foot, horseback and twice sailing by it in my own boat, but this time park staff showed us around and it was fun to see it through their eyes. It’s one thing to be a tourist or traveler; entirely another to see a big park with people who have great insight and knowledge of a place. As long-time Chief of Interpretation, John Dell’Osso said: “I have a huge passion for this amazing park – let me show it to you.” You bet!

The problem, of course, was to figure out a way to show all five separate and different Point Reyes habitats into one painting – ocean with whales and elephant seals, estero (like Drakes Estero in the distance in the photo), uplands with scrub, forests with cypress, fir and redwood, and of course  Tomales Bay estuary and wetlands on the other side of the mountains. Impossible, of course, so after two days of trying, I finally admitted defeat and fell back to something called reality.

So, the painting will be all about this habitat: coastal scrub with an amazing collection of critters and plants. I’ll be painting tule elk, black-tailed deer, scrub-jays, hummingbirds and quail. Oh boy! Just to be on the ground here was so much better than trying to paint a place without seeing it first-hand. Hear that you guys that don’t send us for a field trip?? This one will be GOOD!

Here are the flat-hat pros that know their stuff like few others: John Dell’Osso on the right and John Golda left. The artist with his sketchbook in the middle just wishes he could stay here forever.

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.