Happy Earth Day! Come celebrate this weekend at the Point Reyes Birding and Nature Festival.
Point Reyes is a really cool place both geologically and biologically. Located north of San Francisco, this oddly-shaped peninsula sits on the Pacific plate while the land to the east of the peninsula sits on the North American plate. Point Reyes has traveled up the California coast along the San Andreas Fault and continues to move northward. Point Reyes is home to a huge diversity of birds and marine life. This weekend, the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin will be hosting a birding and nature festival full of birding expeditions with the experts, elephant seal watching trips, tidepooling, and field sketching. Stop by on Saturday, April 26 and say hi! I will be setting up a booth to sell my artwork, cards, and pendants (and will probably sketch a few birds while I'm up there). Hope to see you there! http://www.pointreyesbirdingfestival.org/site/
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I just completed a small painting of a Texas bluebonnet with two blue cornflowers. The painting is for a person visiting Texas from Germany, and the person who commissioned this piece asked for flowers that would represent both places. I thought it would be fun to show a slideshow of the progress photos I took along the way.
Two of my drawings are now part of a new interpretive trail guide for the University of California Natural Reserve System (UCNRS) Granite Mountain research center. I just received the final trail guide in the mail, and it turned out really great! Many thanks to Tasha La Doux, Assistant Director of the research center and Keith Gaddis, my good friend and supporter! The trail guide takes visitors through the diversity of animals and plants found in this beautiful Mojave Desert habitat, including the tent caterpillar and tarantula hawk wasp. Garland Ranch Regional Park is one of my favorite places to hike in the Monterey Bay Area. The park has beautiful hilly oak forests, winding streams, and even a patch of redwoods. It is also home to a huge diversity of wildflowers that pop up in the springtime. To celebrate the grand opening of the park's newly remodeled visitor's center, the park is putting on a juried wildflower show featuring artwork by local artists. Two of my paintings will be part of the show! Stop by the new visitor's center on Earth Day, April 19th, for the grand re-opening and start of the show. The artwork will be up through August 10th, 2014. Piperia transversa (left) and Piperia michaelii (right) are two species of native orchid that grow at Garland Ranch. Piperia orchids, or rein orchids, have tubers buried underground and very small inconspicuous leaves. The plants depend on symbiotic relationships with mycorrhizal fungi, which extract nutrients that would be otherwise unavailable to the orchids. These orchids are difficult to spot most of the year, with the exception of spring and summer when they send up a single spike of flowers to attract nocturnal moth pollinators.
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