Tag Archives: Wildlife

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

Red-breasted Nuthatch study

Nuthatch-Alder

A new little painting today: Click and it should enlarge in your browser.

Here at home in our little forest I see these little birds enough that I’ve gotten to know them individually and as friends (which I think they are). The suet feeder gets a workout from nuthatches, chickadees, along with the woodpeckers (including a pileated or two), but painting a nuthatch on the feeder seemed, how should I say, indelicate. So, wanting to show off my little backyard bunch, I painted one with an early fall feeling, red alder seed cones, leaves fallen, that golden glow we all know won’t last.

Nuthatch-Alder-framed

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 framed.
This custom frame has a triple liner and glass. Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

And, if you know others who might enjoy this weekly post in their inbox, just send me their email address. I’ll never give it to anyone else – I promise.

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

White-crowned Sparrow study

White-crowned-Sparrow

White-crowned sparrows are favorites of mine – so, a painting of one. We don’t see them much in our meadow, but that erect stance, blasting song by the male, white ‘hat’ raised in voice always makes me smile as I pass them on the roadsides. There are several separate subspecies of white-crowns, and the one here in the Pacific Northwest is much more brilliantly-colored than the interior birds. Sitting here on this beaten up sword fern, he looked to be trying to remember what spring was like when he was courting. Ah, those were the days.

White-crowned-Sparrow-framed

Sorry, this one is sold.

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 framed.
This custom frame has a triple liner and glass – but I have other frames if this one doesn’t suit you. 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

Wilson’s Warbler Study

Wilsons-Warbler

This painting is still available as of Tuesday, August 26 at 8am PDT. Email me if you’re interested. SORRY, IT’S SOLD.

We have a little pond, an important water source this time of year for all sorts of wildlife – squirrels, deer, probably bear and bobcat, our local cougar – and these little summer warblers tend to hang there too. This male was flitting around near the little waterfall I contrived to make the water unstable for mosquitoes, and watched him as he got himself soaked with a misstep. I thought it a might be a nice painting (before he got soaked).

Wilsons-warbler-framed

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 framed.
The custom frame is included, and has a triple mat and glass. 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

Winter Wren Study

Winter-Wren

 This painting was sold before it hit the blog, but I wanted to post it anyway.

Saw this little guy in the broken fir right out the studio window. I love these little birds with their cocked short tails and big heads, a sizzling voice that just goes on and on, like a kettle on the stove but more musical. They defend their little forest area from all comers, even me if I get too close. I’ve had them actually jump on my boot, as if a bird that weighs less than an ounce can have some effect on an intrusive boot.

 

Winter-Wren-framed

 

 

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

Spotted Towhee Branch Study

Towhee-branch

I watch these birds each morning and noon, scrambling around on the big feeder just a few feet from our table. ‘Saucy’ would be a good towhee-adjective, active and constantly tail-flicking, they probably have to eat all the time just to keep up with it all.

Towhee_branch_framed

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 framed in a custom frame, triple mat that has an outside measurement of about 13″x 17″.

Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details. Jump fast – these guys don’t stay around long.

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

Squirrels Everywhere

Squirrel-Tiger-Lilies

Certainly a fruitful spring here. Three fawns in the meadow, more Douglas squirrels than we can count, and the female junco whose nest is hidden in the hose coil is going on her third, yes third, brood. Yesterday I checked the car’s air filter, and sure enough there was a squirrel’s nest in there again. I’m telling you, it’s not too easy to live with Nature, but we probably wouldn’t be nearly as happy without it – especially without the “Big Boys”, those two bucks that hang here every day.

At any rate, here’s my homage to it all – a Douglas squirrel with our tiger lilies in bloom (although the horse radish has sort of taken over that area of the place and the lilies are somewhat overwhelmed). The painting looks calm, but I’m telling you – it’s not.

This painting is an acrylic on hardboard, 15″ x 15″ and available unframed for $375. Email me if you’re interested. I can also get a nice custom frame, but for that we need to talk.

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

Ochre Stars in Trouble – My July Story in 48 North Magazine

2014-7-starfish-wasting

Click to on the story to enlarge it and read the most interesting and disastrous events unfolding around the Northwest’s starfish populations.

I wrote and painted this page about a month ago for 48 North – but since then we’ve been looking more intently for ochre stars, or any starfish for that matter. It’s not good. So, this is one of the current environmental tragedies unfolding in the Pacific Northwest. Starfish of all sorts are dying by something we humans have called “Starfish Wasting”. No one knows exactly why this is happening, but many think it’s some sort of virus. Stars are the top dog in the nearshore food chain. Without a healthy population of these guys, other critters like shellfish and urchins tend to take over, throwing everything out of control. The stars simply waste away, arms fall off, bodies turn into a mass of molten goop.

SAM_1900

Yes, those are ALL mussels at Tongue Point, without a star in sight.

We’ve already seen this ourselves. On the lowest tide of the year last month, we went to Salt Creek and Tongue Point, west of Port Angeles and where there should be good populations of stars. Instead, we found shellfish completely out of control, acres of them. The ONLY star we saw was this little blood star, surrounded by shellfish in all directions.

SAM_1882

Then we hiked the Ozette Loop a week later, a 9.5 mile loop on the west side of Olympic National Park, same thing. After two nights on the beaches and scouring 3 miles of coastline, we did not see a single star of any kind. Not a good sign, for sure (but the hike was as wonderful as like gets).

A friend, Camille, is a Washington Dept of Fish and Wildlife clam-expert, and she’s now telling me there are young ocher stars along the Hood Canal – possibly signs the disease is passing, but who knows? Certainly not us! We are really only visitors here, and contrary to some, we are simply not in charge or even know much about the planet we share.

I also can see that using art to enhance awareness of environmental events is probably a high form of communication. What do 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.

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.