Last night I posted an image of a painting that has always been my favorite of the few “wall-hanging” canvases I’ve done. This illustration was the first digital image I did that I felt was the equal of my better brush and pigment work. It was the “centerfold” of the April-June 2002 issue of Bay Nature magazine (hello David and Dan) and shows the native frogs and toads of the San Francisco Bay Area.

On the left hand (water) side is the California Red-legged Frog (Rana aurora draytonii) above the Foothill Yellow-legged Frog (Rana boylii). On the right (land) side, top to bottom, there’s the Pacific Treefrog (Hyla regilla), the Western Toad (Bufo boreas), and the Spadefoot Toad (Spea hammondii). Along the bottom are shown the stages of development of the Pacific Treefrog. (The Photoshop PSD file, had 31 layers and was over 110 megabytes in size – the “flattened” single layer TIFF file on disc for the printer was still 49 megabytes)

Note: I’ve decided that the first big Olduvai post will be in 2 weeks and will feature a visual history of proboscideans in North America. I’ll start with the most recent, the mammoths and American mastodon and work my way deeper into time. It will be all new art, and since I want to do the subjects justice, it may take more than one post to go all the way back to the first gomphotheres. There, I’ve said it…now all I have to do is make it happen.