Tag Archives: national parks

Western survivors

On my first western trip, I visited Moab in July. We went hiking in 105 degree heat, the sun pounding the ground and anything above it. We learned to respect the desert, because the desert will win.

I always stop and admire the brave stalwarts of the desert—that scraggly tree growing from a forbidding rock face or that little flower, full of color if only briefly. They can never move. They survive or die.

In an ancient landscape shaped by wind and water on continents that no longer exist, the desert plants are ephemeral. Like the ruins of the southwest and our cities, the landscape will outlast them. But they, like us, can be beautiful for their time.

Scrub at Canyon de Chelly National Monument

Wildflower in Capitol Reef National Park

A lone tree at Bryce Canyon National Park

Wildflower at Zion National Park

The Art of the Park

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I’ve posted many times before about my love for WPA-era travel posters and some of my own tribute work. I have a wall of stylized postcards that I have collected along my travels. Like the parks passport stamps I described a few months ago, the WPA postcards became an exciting item to collect. Every time I have a visitor in my home, we talk about the parks. Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, county open spaces, state parks, they are all wonders of the west and worthy of a place on the wall. Not all of these places have postcards, which I am slowly working to remedy. But today’s post is about the great parks’ art that I have accrued and slathered upon my walls.

The wall in all its glory!

Below I include a few of my favorites from the wall. Some of the cards I like the depiction of the specific piece of scenery, others I like the color palette or the stylization. We all have stories about our visits to parks. These cards tell stories; the stories of these cards have augmented my stories. They let me dream for weeks and months after a trip about the animals, the scenery, the history, and the cultures of the parks I visited.

New Mexico has 14 National Monuments, extensive Bureau of Land Management sites, wildlife reserves, open spaces, state parks, and more. In a future post, I’ll talk about my work to create posters for the New Mexican sites that lack them today.

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Great Pop-up books

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Last week, I wrote about my own pop-up work. I’ve admired pop-ups since I was a kid, although I had only one pop-up book throughout my childhood. It was called Les Dinosaures and it was in French. I don’t read a word of French, but I examined the book until I shredded it. I suppose after my parents saw the wreck I made of that book, I never got another one until I started buying my own in adulthood. Below are a few of my favorites. As you can see, pop-ups cover any topic, from the literary to the historic to the nerdy. Pop-ups convey wonder and humor. I’d love to hear pop-up suggestions, too!

The White House: A Pop-Up of our Nation’s Home

Hot off the presses, a 2016 pop-up book. In my favorite page, opening a tab opens a curtain, but a photo would hardly do it justice. Little delights abound in this book. I found my copy at the LBJ presidential library in Austin, Texas.

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Moby Dick

I found this lovely pop-up at the Kansas City Art Museum. Their gift shop had dozens of pop-ups, and in a frenzy, I had to choose one. This book has ships with riggings, pull tabs, and twisting whirlpools. It’s cartoonish and I love it.

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Star Wars: A Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy

I have a habit of finding my pop-up books in strange places; my Star Wars pop-up book came from the Denver Museum of Miniatures, Dolls and Toys. The museum contains numerous lovely dollhouses, historic and modern, in southwestern styles, Victorian styles, and more. It’s also full of Star War toys. This pop-up book is so jammed full it can be hard to open. The back panel features Luke and Vader facing off with lightsabers, which light when the page is opened. My favorite page shows Anakin Skywalker in the Vader mask–as you open the page, his face disappears into the mask. A true nerd’s pop-up book.

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America’s National Parks: A Pop-Up Book

Perfect for the 100th Anniversary of the Park System, it’s the National Park pop-up book. This book alternates between pop-up pages and flat pages, which is a great way to fit a little more information into the book. The Yellowstone geyser page is lovely, but so tall it was tough to capture photographically. Appropriately, I got this book at Rocky Mountain National Park.

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The National Parks Passport

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Since moving west, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting lots of national parks and monuments. I love the hiking, the photography. I love learning about the geology, the flora and fauna, the history, and the archaeology of the parks. But one silly thing brings me a lot of joy: the national parks passport.

The passport is like a travel passport, but stamps are collected at parks rather than airports/countries. After the initial purchase of the book (about $10), the stamps are free. The stamps are generally located by the ranger in the visitor center. The simplest stamps just have the name of the park and the date. Sometimes there are graphic stamps, and this year, most parks have had 100th anniversary stamps for the hundredth anniversary of the National Parks Service.

Until six months ago, I’d never heard of the passport. I felt like I’d missed so many stamps already. Many friends hadn’t heard of the passport either. Now, walking to the ranger station with my passport, sheepish at my childlike delight, is a part of my park ritual. As of this post, I have 38 stamps from 12 national parks and national monuments. It’s a great way to record travel dates, and a terrific hit of silly endorphins. Most of the national park service sites have the stamps, from national seashores to historic forts to national monuments and parks. North Carolina’s lighthouses have stamps, DC’s memorials have stamps, and the St. Louis Arch has a stamp, to name a few examples. If you have a collecting streak and travel to parks sites, the passport might be a great little friend to you.

The passport is available in national parks gift shops. We leave ours in the armrest of the car, so it’s always ready to go.

Some southwestern stamps from Gila Cliff Dwellings and Chaco Canyon. Chaco has a graphic stamp, which is exciting!

You can by regional stickers separately. Confusingly, there is also a Fort Union in New Mexico, but it was not a trading post. There are stamps for hiking trails and heritage areas, as shown above.

A four day weekend goes a ways out west

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You can do a lot in a four day weekend in the west. We visited White Sands National Monument, Chiricahua National Monument, the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum, Saguaro National Park, and Petrified Forest National Park.

The pictures can say more than me. And I’m already a day late on this post! When I updated my operating system, my entire photo preview collection got eaten. Poor computer has been slaving around the clock since I discovered that yesterday. No data lost, but lots of work for compy and about 300 gigs of disc space that’s in limbo. Remember to back up your libraries!

White Sands in New Mexico

Footprints in White Sands

Bonita Canyon in Chiricahua

Rhyolite Pinnacles in Chiricahua

Hummingbird at the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum

Saguaro National Park

Painted desert in Arizona

Petrified wood on a rock pedestal

Water Polo Designs & T-shirts

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Is there any greater joy in art than seeing a project through and sharing it with others? I designed some water polo t-shirts, and finally they have arrived. They look phenomenal!

Plus, it’s a great joy to design for water polo. It’s a small sport. Maybe you’ll see a neat poster for the Olympics, but that’s about it. The women’s game is especially short on designs. This year, I took my design inspiration from art deco sports posters and the National Parks vintage poster series.

Art Deco poster style

I wanted to convey the sense of motion I like in the art deco posters. The curve of the water surface suggests energetic water. It could also suggest the curve of the ocean.

Vector artwork for t-shirt

Final t-shirt result

Source pencil drawing

Below: An art deco poster I particularly found inspiring. Early versions of my design incorporated gradients to suggest form, as in this poster. In the interests of simplifying printing, I chose to go with two colors.

Mistrzostwo Swiata: Krynica by Stefan Osiecki and Jerzy Skolimowski, 1930. For the 1931 Ice Hockey World Championships in Krynica, Poland.

Below: an alternate idea. Like basketball, a lot of action in water polo happens at the center position. Unlike basketball, the offender and defender stay relatively fixed, facing away from the goal. The offensive center wants to turn forwards or backwards to take the shot. The defender waits to react. I hoped that the slightly disjointed postures suggested depth or motion.

Design made into a poster. Perusing Wikipedia, I discovered that water polo has a surprising variety of names for a sport invented only about a century ago.

Original pencil sketch. Eventually dropped the water ripple and turned it more geometric.

National Parks poster style

All the teams in our water polo conference, the Atlantic Conference, are in North Carolina and Virginia. Three out of the five are close to the Blue Ridge Parkway, and none are coastal. This gave me the idea that the conference could be thought of as the Blue Ridge Conference.

The championships this year were held in Charlottesville. Humpback Rocks are a popular hiking destination along the Blue Ridge near Charlottesville. People often hike Humpback rocks at sunrise to get the view of the Rockfish Valley. This fell quite naturally into a vintage style poster look.

This design was a super rush job. I drew the sketch at 10PM before the deadline the next day. The next morning I vectorized it. The shirts arrived a week later. I probably now would choose to make the figure white, for better clarity at a distance, but I still like the design.

Blue-ridge-tee

They didn’t go for my conference renaming. =P

Original sketch.

One of the national parks posters that inspired this design.

Photography in the American West

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This week I visited Moab, Utah. I stand-up (and fall-down) paddled on the Colorado River during a thunderstorm, I hiked in Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, and I stargazed. Most of all, I ravenously took pictures.

Delicate Arch from across a gorge in Arches National Park

Landscape Arch in Arches National Park

Mesa Arch in Canyonlands National Park

Green River overlook in Canyonlands National Park

Milky Way over the red rocks in the Colorado River valley

The Colorado River valley

Park Avenue in Arches National Park

The Gossips in Arches National Park

Arches National Park

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Vironevaeh

Sci-fi, art, science, and writing

Tag Archives: national parks

Western survivors

The Art of the Park

Great Pop-up books