| BIRD
GUIDES
Ever since I was a teenager, spending
more and more of my time out in the woods looking for birds, I wanted
to put together a field guide of my own. So, it was a dream come true
in 1986 when the publishers of the renowned Golden Field Guides invited
me to submit a proposal for a pair of regional beginner’s guides to
the birds of North America. |
Original 1994 edition of Eastern Birds |
|
| But there was a long apprenticeship that led to that exciting offer. I had spent years steeped in the art of bird guide illustration. Starting at age 12 with my own clumsy colored-pencil copies of birds from bird guides I found at the local library, through my yearly studio visits as a teenager with my mentor Don Eckelberry, who was one of the world’s finest bird illustrators, to my later collaboration with field guide artist Guy Tudor on the Birds of the World illustrations for Frank Gill’s textbook Ornithology, I seemed destined to illustrate bird guides. | ||
 |
On these pages of my website, I hope to present an overview of my 25 years as a bird illustrator. I will post a sampling of artwork from the numerous books to which I have contributed. And I hope to present a series of web essays documenting my work preparing the manuscript and 83 paintings (illustrating nearly 900 birds) for my Golden Guide Eastern Birds, a project that took nearly 7 years to complete. But it will take some time to prepare all of the web pages for this site. Please be patient, and come back again soon to visit this area of my website as it continues to evolve. |
|
|
||