National Aquarium

During my spring visit to the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Maryland, I was so amazingly glad to have a sketchbook on hand. So many amazing critters to admire!

Even paused to draw one of the many historic ships on the harbor. Really interesting town, soaked in history and culture. Would love to explore more of Baltimore.

Mushroom Festival Poster!

Oh my goodness, October is whooshing by so fast. I should probably post how the Mushroom Festival poster turned out, since they are now peppered all over the Eugene and Springfield areas in anticipation of the grand event!

My previous post talked about how I was experimenting with the composition. Having nailed that down, I went into make-it-so-mode. I started off with a fast loose sketch to serve as guidelines...

 Then started settling in on the colors that would go into each area (again, fast and loose).

At this point, I realized that my birds were out of whack! I was so fascinated with the strange morphology and brilliant coloration of the turkey heads that they had become too big for their bodies. It's nice to be able to catch these things before a lot of final detail goes into place. So I went back to my reference photos and started getting serious about those turkey details.

Ah yes. Big birds with tiny pin-heads. Now we are talking.

Now that the pesky heads were figured out, started tackling the turkey-tail mushrooms themselves. The fungi are the stars of the show, after all!

And here we have the final shiny rendering.

Which was then popped into the final event poster! (You can see a nice big version of it on the Mount Pisgah Arboretum website.) Fun!

Turkey Dioramas

As I worked on the Mushroom Festival poster this year, I found myself wresting with the relative scale of things. Turkeytail mushrooms are about 7 cm wide, while a wild turkey is at least a meter long. How best to show them both in one image, knowing that the smaller mushrooms need to be the center of attention?

I took a sheet of foam core and cut out a tree branch and a turkey approximately to scale, and then covered the tree branch with paper mushrooms. Then it was diorama time in the front yard!

 

Even with crude, out-of-focus photos, this exercise helped me a lot with my experiments in composition. From there, I did a few very rough color mock-ups of possible poster layouts in Photoshop.

Sending these rough ideas to the festival committee, the response was overwhelmingly positive for the three-turkey parade in the distant background of the tree branch. Hurrah! Next post, I'll go into the details of how I took that crude scribble and turned it into the final poster art.

300 Years of Mark Catesby

My recent trip to Washington DC was triggered by an interesting day of free lectures. Mark Catesby was a scientist and an artist who published one of the first books about plants and animals of North America, Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, starting in 1729. As it turns out, he was heavily influenced by another favorite illustrator of mine, Maria Sybilla Merian--no wonder I like his work so much.

I met up with my wonderful friend Ikumi Kayama for the day of lectures at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. The topics included techniques for drawing, printing, bookbinding, and self-publishing in the 18th century, as well as the science behind the plants and animals depicted in Catesby's amazing two-volume work.

It was eye-opening to learn that after 4 years of gathering research, the book itself took 20 years for Catesby to produce. He didn't have funds to hire a professional engraver, so he engraved all the plates and hand-painted them each afterwards.

We were entertained by some of the strange myths that other science books of the time were publishing about wildlife in North America: the idea that turtles can hunt by slamming shut their carapaces on neck of a snake to chop its head off; or the idea that rattlesnakes can hypnotize a squirrel and make it run down a tree right into the snake's mouth, for example.

We were thrilled to look at an actual copy of one of the original books after the lectures wrapped up. A very exciting day for me, all told!

Los Osos Oaks

While visiting my grandmother earlier this month, I took a bike ride to the Los Osos Oaks State Natural Reserve. I'm already a fan of oak trees, but this particular spot simply knocked my socks off--gorgeous grizzled coast live oaks that are estimated to be around 800 years old, and have a ton of character and expression in their branches.

There were so many amazing shapes to explore that I quickly realized it would be good to fill my sketchbook with little thumbnail sketches, to catch as many snippets as possible while I wandered around. In the margins around each mini-sketch, I've got notes on wildlife--lizard behavior, transcriptions of unfamiliar birdsong, etc. (Click on the image to get a zoomed-in version.)

Idea-Gathering for Wildflower Festival Posters

It sounds like the official Wildflower Festival posters are going to start appearing around the Eugene/Springfield area of Oregon this weekend! To celebrate, more preliminary sketches from that project--when we were still trying to decide what species of bird, and what species of butterfly, would work best. Ideas, measurements, data, doodles.

Some of those quick drawings of birds singing their hearts out are so funny to me. Makes me think of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, where the song sparrow bursts into a rousing chorus of "On Top of Spaghetti..."

4/22/12 Edited to add: Realizing folks may not have followed the link at the top to see the final poster in all its purple glory, will include that image here. Yay!

Wildflower Season

Mount Pisgah Arboretum invited me to do the poster art for their Wildflower Festival again this year. The event, which is scheduled for May 20, 2012, is always a delightful one--great music, great food, great people, and hundreds and hundreds of local wildflowers with botanists galore to tell you all about them.

The featured flower on the poster this year is the riverine lupine, Lupinus rivularis. Since I am such a fan of talking about sketching as a process, here are some of hidden, early layers in the Photoshop file that show me doodling rough shapes and colors before settling in on the final arrangement.

Similarly, the yellow-rumped warbler went through a lot of different poses and refinements before it ended up in its final state.

Keep your eyes open; volunteers will be putting posters up all over the Eugene/Springfield area soon!

More posts about creating posters for festivals at Mount Pisgah Arboretum:

• Lobster Mushroom
• Monkeyflowers
• Witches's cap with banana slug
• California oatgrass

Painting with Graphite

Over Thanksgiving weekend, we found ourselves taking the ferry boat from Seattle to Bainbridge Island. An amazing dose of sunshine prompted me to bust out the "watercolor graphite" and paint passengers, gulls, and landscapes. It was tricky to layer up enough of the graphite to get good darks...but it was rewarding to see the graphite twinkle in the sun!