Process, process, process. Here are two drafts of the same weirdness. Above you see my first draft. It’s how the original idea plopped out of my head and onto paper. Below, is a second draft in which I put more thought into the overall composition. I often end up liking my first drafts best just because they capture an unfiltered something.

I often start drawing without much of an idea of what is about to happen. And then I’ll think I’m done about a hundred times before I go back in and add a bunch of new details or scribbles. It’s scary to go in when something’s looking pretty solid and say, whelp, it might be cool if I just put a bunch of scribble lines around the moon.

Here’s another favorite. I have this one hanging in my bathroom. I came up with this face and drew and drew this face. I don’t remember when I decided this was going to be the face of Aunt Flo. I think the official name of this is Aunt Flow Bears Gifts. I really love how the watercolor turned out, and I love when I have company use my bathroom because they inevitably comment on Ole Flo.

I rent a little cabin on an organic chicken farm (eggs!). It’s common for chicken noises to wake me up in the morning or at anytime, really. I find myself thinking about the distinction and overlap between domestic and wild. Other images here? A Lake Superior sea creature gets ignored because the intrepid explorer spots a squalling gull. Practicing a black bear face and making dark fur using black pen and three colors of marker. Edge Habitat. The edges are where critters hang out. A Very Chunky Yellow Warbler. This warbler must’ve skipped migration or something. Did you know that many songbirds will nearly double their body mass before they migrate and then they burn off all the fat in their migration flight? Bodies are cool.

There’s a bobcat that lives near my house. On a recent walk I found myself looking out at where a gnarly tree branch dipped into the creek. I thought about how if I were a bobcat I’d nap on that branch. I like the retro feel of this one. It’s probably my favorite thing I’ve made in a long while… And there’s always that picky voice when I look at it that wonders if I’ll ever embrace that the cat has that look on its face that cats make after they sniffed someone’s butt.

My friend asked me to draw her Highland cow with lots of flowers and lots of pink. She prefers the bottom image and I prefer the top. There are about a thousand cow sketches in my notebook now.

Fox time. Last summer I got on a kick of drawing foxes in the foreground of drawings of plants that were actually experiments with mixing media… There are aspects of these drawings I love, like the aspens look like when I did field work in Colorado, and the big yellow prairie flowers look like how I feel in a late summer prairie. And yet, I also see these and wish I could get in the habit of spending a little more time planning a drawing or at least getting the fox eyes to look, foxy.

I drew Gull Island while in an airplane that was stuck on the tarmac. I had just camped with friends on the coast in Olympic National Park. There was a sea stack by our campsite that had huge flocks of birds nesting on it. Even with binoculars, we couldn’t see the birds very well but they sure made an impression. Part of the fun of this for me was that when I first arrived in Seattle for my trip, we went to the art store and I bought five markers. That became my pallet for the whole vacation.