As reported earlier, last weekend I went to Seattle and met up with a bunch of illustration friends to see the Picasso exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum. My travel through the art exhibit periodically intersected with a tour group, and the leader of the tour did a great job of talking not only about the art but the scandalous love life of the ( Read more... )

This past weekend I headed to the Seattle Art Museum with the Northwest Chapter of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators, to see the Picasso exhibit. The exhibit was good, though the crowds were dense even with timed tickets. I tried the audio tour twice, but turned it back off almost immediately both times. There were too many interesting ( Read more... )

This past Saturday, I co-taught a class in nature sketchbooks at Mount Pisgah Arboretum with the marvelous Kris Kirkeby. We focused on shading, composition, and tips & tricks for getting work done fast when the weather is shifting! (The weather shifted in a fortunate way, I'm happy to say--though I got positively drenched heading to the workshop ( Read more... )

This past Sunday was the 29th annual Mushroom Festival at Mount Pisgah Arboretum. In earlier posts, I showed chunks of the early planning stages of the artwork for the poster. In the interest of closure, here's a slideshow that goes through all the layers of sketches through to the final art. (It's all drawn in Photoshop, with different layers of ( Read more... )

Oh my goodness, so far this autumn has been about as much of a whirlwind as summer was! Never a dull moment, I can be thankful for that. Have a big backlog of images to upload and share, but I'll start with the most recent and straightforward story ( Read more... )

Still working on refining the art for the Mushroom Festival poster into its final format. Last night I was kind of regretting the choice of a habitat that was so strewn with tiny needles from the western hemlock tree. While it's an accurate choice of habitat for the witch's hat mushroom, it's a bit of a chore to draw all those needles.


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OK, the poster art for the witch's hat mushroom plus giant banana slug is gradually slithering towards a nicer presentation. The crude sketch where I settled on arrangement and color scheme, here...


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Fun as it was to post messy color sketches of the early Mushroom Festival poster drafts last night, it's only fair to rewind a bit to show the earlier steps of the process.

Step One: Go to the local jug band music festival and flop on the lawn with a sketchbook.


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Working on a rough draft of the poster for this year's Mushroom Festival. My first thought was to share the fun b+w doodles in my sketchbook, done while reading through all the field guides to learn the true nature of Hygrocybe conica. But no, that would be too simple. Instead, here's an incredibly ugly color scribble as I try to decide where to go ( Read more... )

Went hiking last weekend with some friends in the lovely Brice Creek area of Oregon. Shady canyon dominated by towering trees, really lovely scenery. We all stopped on the trail to admire a gorgeous specimen of Indian pipe (aka ghost plant) growing precariously along the slope. The ghostly-white flowering stalks were really stunning. Dang, let's ( Read more... )