I was going to share a different blog with you today, but the other day I painted the view from my desk and I happened to take photos at each stage of the process so I wanted to share it with you. It's a view that I feel incredibly privileged to wake up to every day and I often do little sketches or quick paintings of it. It's the northern end of the Santa Lucia Range, and at the top of the furthest peaks you can see sparse trees, burned in the 2016 Soberanes fire.

Today I’m going to take you through the process of making the first painting in the series, titled Intersections of Land and Sea.

What do birds have to do with landscape? We may think of birds as creatures of the air, but their connections to the landscape are abundant. From interacting with and influencing their habitat through nesting, migration, and predation to how their physical presence becomes a part of the landscape we see.