Tag Archives: Wildlife

New Painting Post

Exit Glacier mural sketch

This will enlarge if you click on it so you can see the details.

I recently posted the on-location concept sketch for this project, and now here’s the proper drawing I’ve presented to the Chief of Interpretation at Kenai Fjords National Park in Alaska. Exit Glacier is in the background, outwash plain coming down into the forest near the Nature Center, young cottonwoods, alders and spruce emerging from a landscape the melting glacier recently left behind. Moose, bear, coyote and short-tailed weasel among the group. I think I’ve got it.

I get questions about how I construct these larger images, so if you click on the concept sketch link above it’ll open in another window so you can compare. That was what I went from back here in the studio, plus a bunch of photos. The parks usually give me a species list and the number of elements they want to see. There are one or two still missing here, but I’ll get them in – like a marmot and mosquitoes, but I think I got all the rest in.

When the art is installed in the Exit Glacier Nature Center, a nearby panel will have some buttons that, when pushed, will produce digital sounds as if you might be standing there in the forest listening to nature ‘talk’ to you. A moose vocalization, insects buzzing, raindrops plopping, the glacier booming, rustling of birds – the beautiful clear and ethereal voices of the varied and hermit thrushes, those soft forest whistles you can never forget. Soundscapes are a new way to interpretive these murals and I think it’s a great idea as long as the device doesn’t break down. Now if they could just pipe in the smells of moose pellets on forest duff!

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

Alpine Painting for the Schulman Grove

(both these images should enlarge if you click them)

This week I finished the first of three paintings for the new Schulman Grove Visitor Center near Bishop California. Below are the sketches, pinyon forest on the left, bristlecone forest in the middle and the alpine goes on the right. Together they take up an entire wall of the new building and both doors are lined up to showcase the paintings when you walk in the place, a beautiful new off-grid summer visitor center located in the Schulman Grove at about 10,000′ elevation. The alpine painting shows 14,252′ White Mountain in the background, only about 250 feet shy of Mt Rainier and Mt Whitney. The painting’s location is placed several thousand feet lower in a land of belly-plants, marmots and bighorn sheep, but still a landscape of stark light. It was not easy to pull this off, as there are very few resources telling me what grows at this high, dry and inhospitable place. With this one behind me, I look forward to the other two coming next along with a series of ink and watercolor images for the other exhibits.

As you all know by now, I tend to paint trees. I’m very pleased the Forest Service chose me for this project as Great Basin bristlecone pines are the oldest trees on our planet. I also love these high mountain tree forests, especially this famous grove. To walk among these ancient and gnarled artistic sculptures we call trees is to walk with nature far beyond what I can understand. There’s a stark quiet here that sustains my thoughts of these living wonders far beyond the initial visit. One of them here at Schulman has been cored to 4750 years of age, a thousand years older than any other known tree species. Other downed bits of wood, branches and trunks long dead, have extended these dates back over twice that far and have actually helped rewrite climate history knowledge. But those are just numbers. How do you truly understand any of this when I will be lucky to live less than 1/50th of that?  And here I am at this brief moment of my life trying to create something that will educate some of us about all this. Daunting.

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

Red-legged Kittiwakes

I’ve never painted this bird species, and in Seward Alaska recently there were lots of them at the SeaLife Center, so, I just had to take a stab at a painting. We heard someone trying to describe the white on kittiwakes as “the whitest white.” I’d go farther. To me it is so white as to be a void, as if touching one would put your hand into a cosmic hole so deep and profound is that lack of color. They’re a very localized species, nesting on offshore islands of Alaska and spending winters in the Bering Sea, and their populations are down by about a third in recent decades as are most pelagic birds and sea animals around there. Black-legged kittiwakes were there as well, and we saw them on rocks just like this out out in Resurrection Sound with the Stellers sealions near the caving glaciers.

It’s always thrilling for me to see a creature as soft and vulnerable as this making a home in such a forbidding and harsh place. I tried to show that in the colors. Glacier-sculptured rock, windblown and water-blasted cliffs are this creature’s life, never mind the winters of driving snow, ice and hurricane-force winds. And we complain about so many unimportant  and casual things. What do they complain about?

 This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $160 unframed.
A mahogany frame with linen liner makes it a total of $180 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print, but prints will be available soon.
Email us for details.

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.

Murals, New Painting Post, Waysides

A National Treasure- Sol Duc Valley in Olympic National Park

National_Treasure

I ran across this post I had originally written last year, but somehow it was never published. I probably had a bunch of posts and this one didn’t make the cut, but it’s never too late for good art, right?

As one drives up the Sol Duc Valley, on the northwest side of Olympic National Park west of Seattle, there are lots of pull-outs with overlooks to the river or trails leading to some of the best forests I know. This isn’t quite temperate rain forest, but it’s close. It truly is a National Treasure, and it’s a big thanks to the folks at Olympic N.P. who continue to allow me to paint my “backyard”.

Readers seem interested in the artistic processes that go into these more complex paintings. It’s one thing to paint a fine-art image of an old-growth forest. I can just be, well, “artistic” and I paint what I see or what I like, but these complex collages with lots of species are a different beast. Not only do I have to paint the bear, but it has to at least appear to be very accurate. It has to be sized properly with reference to dozens of other critters, and it has to be animated and not stiff. I can’t place, say, a bobcat right next to a rabbit, or a shady plant out in the open. Sometimes it’s a real challenge.

Here’s the fourth draft of the initial sketch.

Wayside UniGuide Grid v. 2.0 (September 2006)
Wayside UniGuide Grid v. 2.0 (September 2006)

As you can see, the finished painting ended up being wildly different than this sketch. Critters appeared, then disappeared, then arrived in other locations. (Sort of like the squirrels that continually try to break into our barn. I chased one out today that was attempting to hide in the Fiberglas insulation over my workbench.) I also had to figure out what to paint behind the text, so this painting could also be used for other things such as park publications and exhibits maybe without the text – or maybe even a future jigsaw puzzle.

And you thought being an artist was easy! Well, maybe not easy, but after 40 years it’s still a lot of fun. It’s often said that being a painter is an old-man’s game. I’m starting to believe it.

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.

***previous*** — ***next***

New Painting Post

Mount St. Helens – Meta Lake at the eruption

If you’re reading this blog for the first time, it’s because I shamelessly added your name after a personal contact with you. I’ve published these art posts about once a week for years, showing new work, paintings, park projects and such. You can unsubscribe at any time by telling me in a reply.

Here is another bit of art for wayside panels recently completed for Mount St. Helens. If you click on it, the image should enlarge in your browser.

This shows Meta Lake, northeast side of the volcano near Portland, Oregon in May 1980 just as the blast cloud is approaching (you can see it over the treetops). In a few seconds, almost all nature here will be obliterated and, as you can see in the upper right panel photo, this old-growth forest will be reduced to ruin. But the mice and toads below the snow (shown in the insets) will survive, and in a few months begin to colonize this area again.

Imagining what this was like at that moment was fun. Would there have been snow in the trees? How much snow would there have been on the lake ice in May? What would the blast cloud have looked like at this point a few miles from the volcano? What do mice look like sleeping in their winter dens? How bent over would the little shrubs be beneath the snow? It seems amazingly easy to paint gallery canvases after doing this stuff. It’s the same paint getting splashed on the same canvas, but if it’s for me and not a park, no one tells me what to paint and I really don’t care if anyone likes it or not. That’s satisfying, sure – but this is challenging because I learn something new with each painting. Thanks for SeaReach for contracting me for this, and Becky at Mt St Helens for her skillful word-crafting. If was a fun project.

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 New Puzzle Release – Elk Prairie

Elk Prairie Puzzle

Nancy and I are proud to announce a new puzzle – Elk Prairie, a 18″ x 24″ 500-piece jigsaw puzzle like our many others (almost 50 now). This one took awhile to produce, but we think it’s one of the best we’ve printed in years. It features the increasingly rare pocket prairie habitat of old-growth forests that are found from Northern California to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. This is home to Roosevelt elk, pileated woodpeckers, bears, bobcats and coyotes. Closer in the foreground, you’ll find snakes, toads, lizards and other plants and animals that make up this interesting ecosystem. It’s a crowded place.

As usual, the box back has all sorts of interesting interpretive stuff on it, and we think it’s a puzzle you’ll enjoy putting together as much as I enjoyed painting it. If you click the image, it should enlarge in your browser.

You can click through to the website and buy it here, or, you can just Email us for details and we can send it with an invoice to pay from.

Thanks for reading this week, and we hope you like the new puzzle.
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. She’s working on a new website that looks great.

New Painting Post

Necedah Wildlife Refuge installation

 Last week, someone asked:“what happened to that last big mural you did in, where was it? Necedah Wisconsin?” And, as life often gets by me, I had to say “beats me, haven’t even seen a photo of the installation.” So, with an email and a little poking around on Flickr – here it is, or at least a part of it. You can only see about half of the 130 feet as it goes around the bend and off into the sunset. If you remember, these were the two paintings that were scanned and printed at 300% from the original, then hung like wall paper. I’d say it looks pretty good – at least in the photo.

Some people are shocked when they find out that I not only didn’t go to Necedah for research (too much snow – couldn’t have seen what I needed anyway), but that I didn’t go there to install it (someone else’s job). I’m not sure I liked that, but that’s the way these things go sometimes. No going for research was difficult and I certainly could have used a few hours on the ground with my camera. It’s the details I just can’t get from a few on-line photos, like how the ground looks, how plants grow out of it, how much downed branches and logs, how varied the plants are between sunny and shady areas – endless stuff you normally don’t notice. Sure, a species list helps, but how many, where do they live and which ones did I need to use? In the end, I just made it up from years of doing this stuff, and everyone seems to like it.

When I was growing up as a backroom brat in the Illinois State Museum where both my parents worked, Robert Larson was museum staff habitat diarama background painter (now there’s a business card title). He was a pretty famous dude – but to me he was just the tall guy that threw paint around. I’d go down there and watch him do his stuff and he painted amazingly artistic, huge yet realistic backgrounds for exhibits that looked so real you’d swear the wolf moved each time you saw the exhibit (turned out they had an extra wolf mount they switched out occasionally). Watching this guy paint was my only training for painting these big canvases, and here it is a half-century later and I’m still at it – so, he must have had the magic that so influences kids they are determined to spend the next 50 years trying to do the same thing.

The huge, really really huge difference is that Bob Larson could take a year to do the painting you see here – and I did it in 35 days!!

Here’s one of the paintings again in full view.

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

Migrating Dunlin – Taking a Break

 

 

We were out on one of the West End Olympic beaches the other day – Beach #2 maybe, and up in the wrack I spotted this little dunlin. It seemed okay, probably just taking a well-deserved rest. What was unusual for us was that it was in the finest breeding form, a suit of clothes we don’t normally get to see over on Puget Sound around Port Townsend – over there we see Fall southbound birds in dull-gray clothes. I’m guessing that it was about half way on the north-bound migratory journey from Mexico to the North Slope of Alaska. There were a couple other dunlin also on the beach, so we assumed this one was with that bunch, and the fact it wasn’t alone felt good to us.

I was struck by the enormity of the scene. Visualize giant and endless sets of waves on a rugged shoreline, piles of drift trees all the way up into the forest where winter storms had easily tossed them, millions upon millions of polished stones and bits of driftwood stretching into the distance in both directions – and this tiny 2-ounce hemispheric traveller that weighs the same as two first class letters was on its way from Mexico to the Arctic. Worthy of a painting? I thought so?

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 8″ x 10″ and $125 unframed.
We have nice custom wood frames for $25 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

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.

Clickhere to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography. She has some current posts of the same trip (ours, not the dunlin’s).

New Painting Post

The Marmots of Hurricane Hill

A local project this week. Olympic National Park is just to the southwest of us, we see the snow shining on the peaks just a few miles away. The Olympic Peninsula is a biological island, with water on three sides and lowland on the fourth, so Olympic’s alpine is really isolated from the rest of the continent. Because of this, there are at least twenty-three plants and animals that are only found here – although a couple are on Vancouver Island peaks too. Take a walk in the alpine and you’ll see nature you can’t see anywhere else. One of these is the Olympic marmot, a big meadow-living woodchuck that spends its summers eating sedges and grasses as it prepares for the next 8 months of underground sleeping. We often see these guys hanging out on their den “front porches”, watching for preditors. But recently, their meadows have been changing – and not for the better. One might say the neighborhood has been going to the dogs (coyotes).

So this bit of art will alert visitors as they climb the Hurricane Hill trail to watch for a rare critter that is in trouble. Climate Change? Well, the Park might not say this, but I see thousands of brand new little confers invading the upper meadows, where trees haven’t been before. It’s like winters aren’t as harsh, the growing season just a bit longer. More trees equal better cover for lowland coyotes to sneak through as they go after the marmots. And the coyotes are here since the wolves have been exterminated!

For me, it’s another chance to learn more about nature – and figure out how to illustrate it so you can 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

Low Tide – Cockle

A second shell on the same beach as the post a couple of weeks ago. Okay, I’m hooked on the interesting patterns in the mud and had to do another one – especially with these huge tides we’ve been seeing.

All was gray, green and brown, gray and brown – with the exception of the tiny reddish membranes on the cockle. That subtle red even reflected in the water below the shell. These recent big tides forced us take an afternoon and hike out Dungeness Spit, just to the west of us. Extending 5.5 miles out into the Straits, it’s the longest spit in the country and if there’s a more glorious beach hike, I’m not sure I know where it is. After you get out there a couple of miles, it’s a very wild shore with a big straight-on shore break and that day it was approaching six feet – certainly not the same soft shoreline where this cockle lived it’s long quiet life of possibly 25 years.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on stretched canvas, 8″ x 10″ and $100 unframed.
A nice hardwood frame makes it a total of $130 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Another view:
And below is another version of the same painting I thought might be interesting to post. As I paint, sometimes I hit a big question mark. So, I scan it to have a fresh look on the computer screen. Things look completely different on a back-lit screen. It’s like seeing it for the first time, and I can go back into the studio and make some changes. The top painting is the finished effort, while this one was about half way along. Notice the differences?

Thanks for reading this week.
We now have a mobile phone app set up so if you read this from your smartphone, and it should look better. Tell us what you think.
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.