Tag Archives: Wildlife

New Painting Post

Necedah Wildlife Refuge – Second mural

 

If I have to pick up another paint brush – I’ll just throw up. That’s about the way it is right now. The fingers on this right hand of mine is loose, I’ll say that. And as for how well it’s still functioning, wine probably has something to do with it.

So here’s the second mural completed and ready for shipment. This one is about 12 feet long and 40% of the final size. After digitally enlargement, it’ll be about 29 feet long. What’s that black rectangle you ask? That’s where an underwater diorama exhibit goes. And how long did this one take? Eight days of painting, lots of help from Nancy who’s getting pretty darned good at mud.

And if you haven’t been following this stuff for awhile, this is for the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in central Wisconsin. You can see the rest of the progress at the blog listed below. Nancy’s also been blogging about this too and her link is below.

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

Necedah National Wildlife Refuge – Second Painting

Thanks, everyone, for all the good comments of these recent posts. Hope it’s Okay if I don’t answer every one of them. As you can see, we’re sort of busy right now.

While the first painting is at Malone Design in Georgia being scanned and printed at 300%, we’ve now begun the second mural for the refuge in Wisconsin. This one is all wetlands and there’s lots of water and sky, making it qo fairly quickly – at least quicker then the other with all those leaves and miles of grass. I’ve had to do some research on how cattails and bulrushes grow, the details of their rooting systems. Can’t do that in person around here, because it’s spring and there’s LOTS of water in all the local marshes covering them all up, but that’s what field guides are for.

This one won’t be blown up quite as large as the first one, but it’ll still be a whopper of an enlargement at 250% from the painting. It’s an interesting process, but I think I much prefer painting these big wall at final 100% size, even if it takes some ladder work. That way I know what I’m getting when I paint it – there isn’t any vagueness or question about how it’ll look in final form (and I might sleep better at night).

Thanks for reading this week. These both should enlarge if you click them.
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

Necedah murals – Day 20

 He looks grumpy, but it’s just concentration flowing to that little tiny brush tip!

Click here for a much larger view on the website. 

Far left side still isn’t finished, but we’re getting close. From right edge to the big tree is about 40 feet on the final 3x enlargement. I’m now beginning an entirely new painting equally as long while this section flies to Georgia today for scanning. After that it’ll return for me to finish the left side for that final 24 feet. We were fading a few days ago, but good friend Jan dropped by twice for some professional arm-twisting and muscle rubbing. I felt like a new man!

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

Day 2-4 Necedah National Wildlife Refuge Murals

After a  bunch of round-and-round about sizes, measurements and materials, I’ve now begun two larger paintings for the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin. Stay tuned for progress reports. These two shots are Days 2-4 on the first painting.

Here’s the deal. It’s a new visitor center at the refuge in central Wisconsin. There are 130 feet of walls that need to show, in an artisitic way, five habitats all woven together, from prairie wetlands to sedge meadows, uplands prairie to oak savanna and finally pine forest. Tallest wall is about 12 feet. Normally, I’d do these on theater canvas and they’d be glued up, but we’re trying something technologically new (at least for me). We’re painting these at 30% of final size on Yupo plastic paper, an ultra smooth surface that’s good for high detail. When finished, they’ll be digitally scanned and blown up 300%. So far, the printed samples look pretty good, and it allows me to paint in a much smaller room, and much quicker – and if the visitor center burns down (which has happened), they can put up a fresh copy.

Thanks so much to Port Townsend’s Union Bank for giving me studio space in a community room. They’ve done this before on large projects and have really helped my painting process. While these two paintings are 30% of final size, I still need much bigger walls than I have here in my studio. Nancy’s down there painting away with me, and she’s helping to speed the process up. So far it’s been fun. The story of Necedah and how it relates to my past is an interesting one, but we’ll save that for another post.

Stay tuned for more soon. 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

Three Blind Mice

I’ve been working on three projects at once, some of them fairly large, so keeping it all straight has been interesting. Oh yeah, then there’s this blog-thing.

Here’s the setup: Imagine you’re a little mouse family living on the north side of Mount St Helens 30 years ago. Meta Lake is just downhill, still snow covered even though it’s May. Life is good, you’ve been asleep all winter, waking occasionally but certainly not leaving your cozy little mouse den. Your little clan found this neat little hole a mole had dug, and in a little side room you set up shop for the winter. It’s May, still a month from being able to leave for a brief summer of munching and gaining back the weight you lost over winter, when you awake to hear what sounds like a 1000 jet planes landing right on top of you. Well, whatever it was, it passes by.

Well, whatever it was – turned out to be the eruption of Mount St. Helens, and because this little family was underground, it survived the almost supersonic blast. After the snow melts, rich ash and a destroyed forest will make for a rich succession of plants with lots of seeds and grasses. And, unlike the elk and deer in the blast zone, the mouse family will survive.

Such is the job of a naturalist-artist. This little painting will be an inset to a much larger painting showing the snow-covered forest and that big ugly blast cloud just arriving. Fun stuff to figure out.

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.

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New Painting Post

Magnificent Frigatebirds

This time it’s another graphite and watercolor illustration for John Vigor’s article in Good Old Boat magazine. Magnificent Frigatebirds aren’t new to us, but I never get to paint them – and they sure aren’t around Port Townsend. We’ve seen them while we were camping on the beaches in Mexico, we saw them often while we sailed Ave Mariadown the Baja Coast and up into the Sea of Cortez. Just last year we saw them at Everglades National Park, soaring over the mosquitoes at Flamingo.

These birds are real aerial pirates that never, I mean never, land on water. They soar endlessly along oceanic coastlines even as they sleep. In fact, the only other bird species known to spend days AND nights in flight is the common swift. But being amazingly good at one thing usually means we’re goofy at anything else, and so the frigatebird cannot walk, swim or take off from a flat surface (we’re talking about jumping off a cliff ). Frigatebirds sport a very wicked upper bill that angles down like a fish hook, enabling the birds to latch onto morsels as they fly by, or, they steal it from other birds (chicks in nests included). At 90 inches, frigatebirds have the longest wingspan relative to weight of any bird on the planet. The reddish throat pouch-thingy on males inflates during courtship or while the male is nest-sitting, giving them a rather bizarre look. When I saw a kid (centuries ago) I remember they were called “Man O’war” after the old frigates, which the big birds use to follow for food scrapes.

And you all thought I was just a painter.

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.

New Painting Post

Painting Some Interesting Wildlife

These past few days I’ve been doing some interesting illustrations for Good Old Boat magazine. Graphite and watercolor, not what I normally do – and that made it all the more fun. Author John Vigor provided an interesting article about sailboat cruising and the birds he’s seen from Western Canada to the South Atlantic and beyond. I know, it’s a fairly broad subject, eh? I was given a pretty broad list of choices to illustrate, so I picked the most interesting birds to me. Above are a pair of tufted puffins, local guys for sure – in fact, this pair could be within five miles of our place.

Next on the list was this little guy:

This is a St. Helena wirebird. St. Helena, if you remember, is in the southern Atlantic and is one of the most remote places on the planet. It’s where they put Napoleon after they named an ice cream for him – and maybe also because he started a war (George, the house is now vacant). The wirebird is the island’s only surviving endemic bird, and having never painted it, I just had to do some research (which is the real fun part of this stuff) and try it out. It’s a killdeer-like plover that does a broken wing act just like our local birds here.

There were more, but you’ll have to wait for the May issue to see them – which I’ll post here if I can remember. It was a most interesting project, for no other reason than in one day I got to paint birds from opposite ends of the planet.

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.

Nancy’s website is currently down while we remodel it. Stay tuned.

New Painting Post

New Mural – Exploring the Nearshore

Nearshore of the Elwha River

For the past few months I’ve been working on some projects centering around the dam removals on the Olympic Peninsula’s Elwha River – located about an hour west of here. This painting has just been finished, so I thought I’d pass it around. You and the clients are both seeing it for the first time! It shows the shoreline, Olympic National Park behind, the Elwha River delta on the right – and of course the critters and plants that call this place home.

This is a collaboration between Olympic National Park and Feiro Marine Life Center in Port Angeles, just to the east of where this scene is. One of the big beneficiaries of freeing the Elwha will be the unrestricted flow of nutrients, sediments and drift material from the river into the ocean and then along this shoreline. The river has been blocked for almost a century and this beach is pretty starved, not only because of the dams but also because the shore is ‘armored’ with boulders (read: very bad for critters). In this scene, I’ve hopefully given you an idea of how dynamic and complex this place should be. The painting is destined for the Feiro Center, along with other panels that will tell the story of this, the largest dam removal project in our history. I’m pleased and proud to be part of this forward-thinking environmental project.

These big paintings are always fun for me. I just never get tired of figuring out how to somehow ‘build’ all these 3-D plants and critters into a somewhat realistic and complex world of only two dimensions. It’s a real puzzle. If I continued working on this painting, it would become a very tight and almost photographic work, but I’ve always thought they should be more an “impression” of a scene, and so I try to paint them that way – in an impressionistic style. While it might look realistic on your screen, it’s actually fairly loose in technique.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to. If you know others that might enjoy my musings, they can sign up on the blog page – or by sending me an email.

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

Paintings for Mount St Helens

I haven’t posted anything for a few weeks because this has been a stretch of sketching and preparing for lots of new paintings – but they’re all in progress. Then we took a week to drive down to San Diego, but now I’m finally back in the thick of it and wanted to pass along some of the sketches I’m doing.

This is a first-round draft of one of the wayside paintings I’m doing for Mount St Helens Volcanic National Monument. It’s going to show something that no photographer could show (or wouldn’t want to have tried 30 years ago). Meta Lake is a few miles north of the volcano, and this shows the eruption blast cloud just coming over the hill on the left – wind hundreds of miles an hour cutting down this old-growth forest like it was dried grass. The lake was still frozen then as it was May, and critters were still asleep in their burrows below the snow. It was this cover that helped nature return very quickly here, and that’s what this piece of art will hopefully show. We came here for field research back in October, and the scene is now very forested like the photo at the lower right. It’s a lovely place that is difficult to imagine as a wrecked volcanic blast zone.

I love doing these projects, because we get to learn all this new stuff – and that’s what life is all about – it’s 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.

New Painting Post

Oh yeah, American Forests Magazine

About eight months ago, American Forests organization in Washington DC, who publishes American Forests Magazine, contacted me about using my mural of whitebark pines in peril for a special issue they were planning. American Forests is America’s oldest conservation organization, founded in 1875.

Whitebark Pines may soon become the first major tree species to be listed under the Endangered Species Act, and, thanks to Ron at the Crater Lake Institute who commissioned it, I probably have the only really good painting of these amazing high-altitude trees.

Sounded like a good project, so, I sent the stuff. Time went by and life persisted. Then, today, I wondered what happened  – went online (of course) – and there it was. So I’m passing it over to all of you. Nice mural, key, species list, map, don’t you think? That artist out in Port Townsend supplied that, all for free of course. You’d think I would have, at least, been given a free copy or maybe a lapel pin.

Here’s the entire pdf of the edition. It’s not a big download and the story’s pretty nice.

American Forests Special Report

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.