Tag Archives: Wildlife

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

Feather Dusters – A Worm’s Tale

This is my monthly page in 48 North magazine for February, 2013. You can browse the entire magazine online at the link.

So, we were at the Seattle Aquarium recently and Nancy was photographing the young sea otter, Sequi (she’s shot an entire sequence of the baby for over a year now). I was down in the tide pool room, poking around at the shrubbery in the open tanks – a real crowd of critters. I was reminded of some paintings I did for Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska last year. A ranger at the park, Chad Soiseth (hope I remembered how to spell your last name, Chad), sent me some reference shots of tube worms to paint from, and they were amazingly larger than the 4-6″ locals here in the Salish Sea. At the aquarium,  most people were looking at the star fish and anemones, but there I was, of course, sticking my finger in the tube worms. It just seemed to be a painting waiting to happen, and so it did. The sequence was: kids poking starfish, then poking anemones, but no one cares about these cool worms. So, maybe I should paint THOSE guys for my monthly page – and so it went.

I truly believe, and thanks to my family,  have always believed, that the job of an artist or writer is to not only to create good, competent and skillful work, but to push the viewer to a sense of wonder about something bigger, something larger than just the thing you made. Viewers should be taken to someplace that expands their world, not just ends at the viewing process. It’s not enough to just express myself on paper or canvas, but I try to figure out a way to make people say “wow, I never realized THAT, and maybe I should begin to care and wonder more than I do.”

And the subject doesn’t have to be physically ‘big’. Even a 6″ tube worm will do if the viewer has either never seen it before or seen it in quiet this way – or for that matter, even realized they didn’t care to even look. I sometimes reach too far in my complexity and forget most Americans are pretty clueless about nature, and so I have to reel myself in and go back to some basics. It would have been easy to paint and write about starfish, which everyone knows something about. But a feather duster tube worm?

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 progress

I spent the week working away on this large painting for Point Reyes National Seashore near San Francisco. Back in October, I posted the field trip and concept here, and the final sketch here, and now I’m working on the final painting. This isn’t a huge one this time, 48″ x 63″, but it’s big enough that I had to move it to my downtown Port Townsend studio above Union Bank.

So you don’t have to go back into the old posts (unless you want the real details), here’s the concept sketch again.

You can see the basic idea is there but it’s sure refined into another thing completely.

This is a very fun painting for me, not only because Point Reyes is a singularly beautiful and rare place, but because I have work installed in many other parks in that San Francisco North Bay area – and this is just about my last non-Eifert-art location. Muir Woods (9), Sam Taylor State Park (36), Angel Island, Muir Beach, Muir Headlands, Golden Gate National Recreation Area and some others all have Eifertst for interpretive exhibits and installations, and it’s fun for me to imagine all those little art galleries in the woods and ocean overlooks. Sam Taylor State Park has two trails that have a dozen or so panels each, so a walk in the woods is like hiking through a little art exhibit.

It’s also a real honor to be commissioned, yet again, by my favorite bunch of people, the National Park Service. Best to work with, highest standards of excellence, working for a noble cause and I just plain love going to these amazing places over and over for decades. I hope it never ends.

Thanks for reading this week. I’ve now had this weekly blog going for over 250 posts – that’s a lot of art in over 5 years.
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 Amazing Giant Pacific Octopus

Click the illustration and it should enlarge in your browser so you can read it better.

This is my January 2013 sketchbook page in 48-North magazine. A diver in Seattle recently hauled one of these critters ashore and it caused a big uproar, mainly because it happened right at a seaside city park. There are two much-beloved octopi-adults in the Seattle Aquarium, and the fact this diver-guy took one home for dinner didn’t sit very well with always-nice and extremely liberal Seattle.

So, with that swirling around the local news, I thought I’d do a little illustration and essay about these critters that I THOUGHT I knew about. Little did I know! It was a pity I only had 200 words of text because the giant Pacific octopus is about the craziest animal I’ve ever read about – and that’s saying a lot because I’ve spent my life doing this stuff. To me, it’s enough that they only have two bones in their entire body, but their sex life appears to be the stuff of legends.

As if the essay and sketch page above isn’t interesting enough, like the 14-FOOT arm span or shark and clam dinners, there was even better stuff I had to leave out. Such as: during mating, the male releases a ‘sperm bag’ that’s 3 FEET long, which he then approaches the female with and using one of its 7-foot long arms gently inserts it into her. He gets to do this several times with multiple partners if he’s lucky, but basically that’s it for him – and he dies soon after. When the female gives birth to the 100,000 little octos, they’re all attached to a long ‘rope’ that she ‘hangs up’ in her den. She then fastidiously and constantly grooms this until the kids hatch, where upon she dies as well. Oh, and I could go on, but as my editor said, “I can hardly wait to see the illustration … or not!”

I’m telling you, I never get tired of learning about this stuff, but this time it left my mouth slightly slacked.

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

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.