Tag Archives: Wildlife

New Painting Post

Harlequines Are This Month’s Sketch Page

 Just click on the page and it’ll enlarge.

 

What to paint for my December 48-North magazine page? Well, I was hiking on the beach trail in Port Townsend and two beautiful harlequin ducks were just sitting there on a rock, eyeing me carefully and getting nervous. I stopped – they looked. I immediately wondered if these were the exact same ducks I saw in summer up on the Dosewallips River? Could be, but not likely. After that day on the river, I painted this 24″x48″ acrylic of that spot where the river was roaring in full spring run-off and the alder leaves still in bud.

 

If you read the magazine page at the top, you’ll see that harlequins spend their summers up in the mountain rivers diving in the near-freezing glacial melt waters for insects. Winter comes and here they are in our backyard (well, almost) doing the same in the Salish Sea  -where waters are considerably warmer. I’d like to think I saw the same two birds, but the best thing about birding is that I’ll never know.

 

I’m still rebuilding the web store for jigsaw puzzles, posters and prints and it’s coming along. If you try to purchase something and it doesn’t work, just email us.

 

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

48 North Magazine Cover for November

 I write a monthly feature page for this magazine, 48-North, and occasionally they put one of my paintings on the cover. This month they have my sketchbook story about moon snails and the cover painting is of our 1940 classic wooden Monk sloop, Sea Witch. Wow! While we sold the boat to a Canadian couple two years ago, I still have vast and fond memories of this craft, and of the four big boats we’ve owned, for me Sea Witch was the best – a perfect boat. This painting is called “Otters on the Dock” and when I painted it, I offered it up as a totem to the two river otters that would occasionally pay us a visit and poop all over the cockpit and bright work with stuff that is too awful to even think about. I thought that maybe if I payed homage to these two, they’d cut it out. No such luck.

As I go down memory lane right now, 30′ Sea Witch is a pretty famous boat in the Northwest, having been used as a floating adventure for not just Nancy and I, but also Jo Bailey, who for decades used the boat to write countless cruising stories and several books. Also in the painting are my summer dockside geraniums. There’s a sweet wooden sloop without an engine that my neighbors would sail in and out of the slip with only an oar to stop them. Sparkle in the back that was by far the fastest wooden sailboat boat in town, and the Portside Deli (a fine place for lunch or afternoon coffee). But marinas evolve, and today the only subjects of my painting left in place are the engineless sloop and the otters. And I’m not sure about the otters.

Here’s a photo of Sea Witch at her launch in 1940 in Seattle, sent by Pete VanAtta, son of the gal christianing the boat. She was the daughter of the builder standing in the back.  These old boats seem to create extended families.

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

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

Moon Snails

Here’s my monthly article for 48-North magazine. This will be published in the November issue in a couple of weeks, and I also get the cover! If you click on the image, it should enlarge so you can read the story easier. Quite some critters, these moon snails.

 

The Twins: Photography by Nancy Cherry Eifert

On another subject: On June 8th, I blogged about our backyard fawns.  We currently have 9 deer that come and go in our little meadow. Some pass through and we only see them occasionally, but thanks to Nancy’s efforts at handing out apples to all comers, this spring we had two moms that produced three fawns. This photo was taken around June 1st. This second photo below was taken of the same twins just the other day, October 16, making them about five months old. That’s the same apple tree as in the first photo. They won’t take apples directly from our hands, but I think they would if we spent some time coaxing them. Mom’s still here too, and the three of them spend considerable time standing in the grass patiently waiting for the next cut-up apple. For East-coast readers, these are Columbian black-tail deer, much smaller and more delicate-looking than either mule or white-tail deer.

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

Florida Mural Progress Report

This week it’s just a post about my progress on the central Florida mural. We’re getting there! I posted the initial beginnings a few weeks ago here (September 29) and here (September 9), then we were off on a field trip to Point Reyes so things ground to a halt. Now I’m back in the downtown studio going at it.

 

 

Someone emailed and asked what I used for a palette. Here it is! It’s pretty simple, only about a dozen colors and I use Nova Color exclusively, a special small-company hand-mixed mural acrylic that’s like a milkshake (tube paint is much more paste-like). After I discovered Nova about 20 years ago, I’ve used nothing else and it’s a pleasure to paint with on everything from the biggest cinder block walls to tiny paintings on paper.  You can’t buy this stuff in stores – only online, but I’ve had them ship to me in the field and they’re wonderfully helpful.

 

Here’s the rest of my ‘kit’. A tablet for reference photos (and a few printed out paper references too), dirty paint jar of water, a squirt bottle to keep the paint fluid, and, of course an iced latee from Mean Bean down the street (or Better Living Through Coffee, or Starbucks, or… this town doesn’t lack for Washington’s state drink). And that’s a full-sized paper copy of the sketch in the background so I can figure out what to paint.

Thanks for reading this week. Stay tuned for more.
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

Polk Mural Progress Report

Here’s the sketch. I blogged about this a month ago. This is for the Polks Nature Center in central Florida.

 Painting Day 1 on September 13th: 4′ x 12′ piece of Yupo paper is tacked to the wall, primed and shows progress at the end of the first day of painting.

 Painting Day 3 on September 23, and the basic structure is in place, but now the park folks want some major changes on the left side. Sigh, but now’s the time for big alterations, not when the details are in.

Painting Day 6, sandy areas appear on the left and the horizon is smoothed out. Areas of the background in the center and upper right are tested for color and value, shadows and light. Some critters are blocked in so I can check sizes.

Painting Day 10 September 28, and the thing is taking shape. More critters are defined, trees on the left are gone, trees added in the middle, water is defined better, center part of the painting now shows upper canopy and trunks of the pines in place and ground details are starting to appear.

All these photos should enlarge so you can see them better. This is not being painted on a daily basis while my life progresses in other ways, meaning there were four days out at the Hoh Rain Forest, time spent while I’m replacing 400 feet of new cedar decking, and now we’re off to Point Reyes National Seashore this next week for a field trip. Oh, and I did four presketches for paintings for a Portland project.

Again I want to thank Union Bank in Port Townsend for continuing to give me studio space for these larger projects. I’d be really cramped in my little studio here in the meadow for this one.

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 Porpoises vs The Dolphins

Football! So, that said, this has NOTHING TO DO WITH FOOTBALL. Just a short weekly post about nature.

Here’s my page for October’s edition of 48 North magazine. Sailing off Port Townsend, I often see fins darting about. Not shark fins but more dolphin fins. I know they’re porpoises, but almost everyone else thinks they’re dolphins – so, here’s my bit of interpretive education using art. Nancy says I just can’t let a single person go by me without going into a full-blown classroom session. I admit it, I’m a hand-fed product of Virginia and Herman after-all; she: nature writer, lecturer and he: museum education cureator. The other day at 6,000 feet on top of Hurricane Hill, a couple of hikers were watching a hawk. “Don’t know what it is, maybe a falcon or something” the guy said to his wife. “Northern Harrier, female. Used to be called Marsh Hawk, but they renamed it” I said as I passed them by. He didn’t hear me, so I said it two more times before they both got it. “You just CAN’T let it go, can you?” whispered Nancy. Probably not!

So, click on the porpoises and you can more easily read the text. My parents would have approved! Sure as pigs have wings, it’s not likely you’ll see a dolphin in the Salish Sea.

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

Florida Gets an Eifert Mural

 

And we’re off again! This time it’s a complex habitat wall mural for the Polks Nature Discovery Center in central Florida – and this is going to be FUN. The top drawing is the right side of the 24′ mural, and I wanted to show this first because it’s my favorite part. The scene transcends from the swampy seasonal flatlands pond on the right (above) into the center pine flatwoods with saw palmento and finally, on the left into a sandhill  pines area. There’s a lot going on here, with very juicy stuff to paint like wood storks, alligators and spoonbills. There’s even an orange-red corn snake wrapped around the cypress.

Make sure you click on this bottom image so you can see the entire thing.  As  you can see, I still  have some details to work out in the sandy areas in the lower left, but we’ll get there. I began painting this a few days ago at my “downtown” studio in Union Bank where I have enough space. My little studio here won’t cut it. This will be quick; there are a bunch of other big projects waiting in line – and besides, this is the fun stuff of my life!

 

The colors, atmospheric qualities, horizon line – this is all a very different place from where I live. The Northwest  is a very deep place for colors, almost like it swallows color into a dark hole. The darks are verging on black but the light values are brilliant colors. In fact, I’ve often thought that the Olympics have the darkest forests I’ve ever painted and this creates huge value contrasts with other colors. This Florida painting is just the opposite. There, the atmosphere is so saturated with moisture is softens everything. The sky is pale, the edges of distant forests are almost blurred as they’re filtered through all that wet air. This is probably the most important thing I have to figure out in painting big landscapes: what makes a place look and feel the way it does.

 

I’ll be posting progress reports as I go along with this one.  Get the massage table ready – turn up the hot-tub. I’m ready! This gator’s smiling about it too.

 

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 Politics of Art for Restoring Nature

I was happy and proud to donate some art recently to the Crag Law Center in Portland, Oregon for their newsletter – and here’s the result. You can see the entire newsletter here with more of my art. Crag  has a staff of legal professionals that work with local and regional groups to battle against those well-heeled corporations we all love to hate. They also help community groups organize themselves in a more professional  manner, and work to promote fiscally-responsible environmental conservation – plus a whole lot more. In other words, if you were a little bird in trouble like the murrelet, these are the guys you’d want to have on your side – and they are. As an artist who has spent my life painting and learning about nature, these types of donations are high on my priority list.

 

The pitch: If we have a new president in two months who represents not us and the nature we’re here to conserve and protect, you’re going to see a lot more of this as we all desperately battle yet-again against the forces of evil: better known as the Republicans. Why Americans continue to vote for people who are against the very citizens who vote for them in is completely beyond me, but they do. So, it will take all we have to hold on to the small gains we’ve had during the past four years. Gains? Heck, we’re not even back to what we had and where we were before the last guy drove the country into a ditch.

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

A Loon’s Story

This is to be published in next month’s 48 North magazine for my monthly contribution. Sitting at a campground picnic table the other morning I was meandering through a field guide and ran across some pretty tasty facts about loons – so, I concocted a story about them, then a few sketches, and here’s my page ready to go. The topper was that while sailing the other day I saw a nice adult out in the bay. These things sometimes just come together in a nice way.

A Loon’s Story

 

Hair-raising, bloodcurdling, magical have been used to describe the loon’s call. Often heard at dusk or dawn echoing across wild mountain lakes, I think a loon’s cry is one of true wilderness.

 

This loon spent the summer with his mate on a big lake in British Columbia, helping to raise their family of two on the almost-floating nest of grasses they carefully built. Then on a fishing trip into the deep mountains, he had clumsily landed on a small forest-lined lake and found he couldn’t take off – there just wasn’t enough ‘runway’ for the ancient design of his solid-boned body. After two weeks, an early fall gale aided his departure but by then his family had headed southwest – and so he did too. Now on salt water in the Salish Sea he was content to fish, sometimes diving to 300’, deeper than any other bird.

 

The loon will be here in our Salish Sea from September to May, when he’ll again head back to his corner of that same lake, defend it against other males and hopefully find a receptive female that will begin the process again. While not sporting their elegant iridescent black and white summer colors, these goose-sized birds are still spectacular to see. Keep your eyes open for them.

 

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.