Barred Owl It's been several months since I completed a map for one of the Skagit Land Trust's preservation areas. Today, the signage that incorporates my artwork is being installed up at the trailhead of a recently completed nature walk trail up Guemes Mountain on Guemes Island. This is wh...

These two watercolors will be published as notecards soon by Pomegranate Communications. Each image appears in the 2013 Nature's Peace calendar, also published by Pomegranate, which pairs my watercolors with quotations from John Muir. Like many of my paintings and prints, these were inspired b...

King County Library presents its annual Season of Stories and Songs programming for children in November and December. Their programming director, Deborah Schneider, asked me to design a banner that would suggest the two seasons of late fall and early winter. I had a great time coming up with ...

I just received my order of the boxed Mountain Bluebird notecard; it's just off the press, a reproduction of a block print I created several months ago, published by Pomegranate Communications. Pomegranate describes this card as a notelet-- it's smaller than the usual 4 X 6" notecard. It...

As one of the spring classes offered by the North Cascades Institute, Specimen Drawing at the Burke Museum: Feather and Bone is now open for registration. Class will be held on Sunday, April 22, 2012, from 10 am - 5 pm. This is an opportunity for those especially interested in natural objec...

I'm planning for my upcoming Watercolor Wildlife and Birds class at University Heights Center this spring and aim to present a way of painting that gives a sense of the fluidity of the watercolor medium. Painting loosely also serves as a great warm up and conveys the proportions and contours of...

Today I'm sharing the work of two students who are working in bound books. The first two images are from Marilyn McGuire's handmade journal; to make it she sewed signatures with different types of paper, mostly lighter weight and smoother surfaced papers to allow for penwork and elegant calligr...

I've just finished up the winter quarter class on trees, and here I'm sharing some of the students' fine efforts. The painting to the left is by John Tubbs--he used only a large flat brush to paint this, and successfully painted the entire work in about 45 minutes. He worked on white Arches pa...

Later this season Pomegranate Communications will publish this print as a small notecard. I titled it Mountain Bluebird and I used the same method to create it that I employed on the Goldfinches print, a printmaking technique I wrote about for the Daniel Smith Artists' Materials catalog. I was ...

This week at Snoqualmie Pass, where we skied, I saw these beautiful natural patterns, and couldn't help but hear the words of one of my favorite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, in one of his finest poems: Pied Beauty. Here is an excerpt. Even readers who are not religious can appreciate the poetr...

Nature's Peace, a 2012 calendar which pairs my paintings with quotations from John Muir is published by Pomegranate Communications--it's available through the above link. You can also find it in Seattle at the University of Washington Bookstore, City People's Mercantile, Puget Consumers' Coop...

While teaching my Artful Map course at the North Cascades Institute in June, 2011, I was approached by Forest Ranger Cindy Bjorklund who asked if I would be interested in designing an illustrated map for a new trailhead sign featuring the renovated Happy Creek Forest Walk. This site is just 6 mi...

It has been such a summer pleasure, throughout my life, to spend time friends who have cabins on the waters of Puget Sound. One such friend has a small complex of cabins and a shed up on Samish Island, north of La Conner, WA. As a novice oil painter, I decided to pack up my paints and a canvas b...

This past weekend I taught a watercolor landscape workshop at the North Cascades Institute's Environmental Learning Center. One of the most interesting things we painted was this view of Pyramid Peak from the campus. The mountain changed minute by minute, and it was almost cinemati...

I've been working on more solarplate intaglio etching--looking for the right images to work out in wash and dark and light contrasts is key to exploiting this medium's potential, and I'm still figuring it out. I've done two previous sketches of this scene from Diablo Lake at the North Cascades...

If any trip requires rapid sketching skills, it's one to New York City. I just returned from a visit that incorporated all of my favorite activities: time with family (my musician daughter lives there), inspiring museum visits, explorations of new places, restorative pauses for coffee in cafés...

Yesterday I hiked in the Cascades foothills and found some beautiful springtime phenomena--I love wood violets, the yellow flowers contrasting with the deeper green of the spade-shaped leaves. This trillium is several days old, and has the rosy glow of a fading flower. Here fiddleheads ar...

Last week in class we took a look at Charles Rennie Mackintosh's botanical illustrations. Everyone came up with a marvelous tribute to his work, making it their own. To the left is Terri Stueve's ode to Himalayan Blue Poppies. To the right is Harriet Herschel's Iceleand Poppy.

This week I received the new North Cascades Institute catalog--you can obtain it as a hard copy, or read it online, even turn the pages! I was so happy to see my art on the cover, especially as this painting was done to commemorate a wonderful experience I had at the Learning Center last June...

Daniel Smith Artist Materials just published their summer 2011 catalog, and I was really honored to have my art chosen for the cover. If you'd like to learn more about how I created this art, just check out the Daniel Smith link here. I wrote a short article for them several months ago ab...

I bought this gourd at a farmer's market to share with library patrons in the Sno-Isle Library System, where I am offering several programs on painting nature in autumn. On Saturday I took the Mukilteo ferry to offer two library programs on Whidbey Island--it may have been the most beautiful ...