Sometime in 2008, my wife was volunteering for the Sierra Club. She's always been passionate about the environment, and the work gave her something tangible to contribute to. One day she came across a call for illustrators — someone to create artwork for the Loma Prieta, the Silicon Valley chapter's newsletter. She brought it to my attention, and my reaction was hesitation. I hadn't done anything like it before. But she encouraged me, and when I met with the team there, I found them to be exactly what she'd promised: welcoming, patient, and genuinely forgiving of the constraints a volunteer-illustrator brings.
So I jumped in.
Over the years that followed, that commitment produced several pieces that stand out in my memory — among them, the California Mountain Lion and the Clair Tappan Lodge. The mountain lion was an acrylic painting, one that pushed me to work with the medium in a focused, purposeful way.
The lodge was different: a color pencil work, and the thing that surprised me most about it was the snow.
Snow seems like it should be easy to depict — it's white, after all. But white on white is one of those traps. What makes snow look like snow isn't whiteness; it's the shadows, the shading, the precise angles at which light falls across its surface. Getting that right on the lodge drawing reminded me of something I'd read in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain — the idea that the fundamental discipline of drawing is to render what you actually see, not what you think a thing should look like. Snow isn't white. It's a hundred shades of blue and grey and violet, depending on where the light is coming from. The Clair Tappan Lodge was a good lesson in that.
What made both of them work, I think, was something simple and a little uncomfortable: a hard deadline. The Loma Prieta had a publishing schedule that didn't move. You could submit a polished illustration or a rough one, but you couldn't not submit. There was a press date. There was a printing run — usually in black and white, though sometimes in color when the budget allowed. The work needed to exist by a certain day, full stop.
I'm used to that kind of pressure from my day job. Deadlines aren't just constraints in the professional world — they're fuel. They convert vague intention into actual work. And looking at my shelf of unfinished canvases, the ones I started with genuine enthusiasm and no particular urgency, I understand exactly why they're still unfinished. Without a publishing date, without someone waiting for a file, I let the perfect be the enemy of the done. I tinker, I second-guess, I set it aside.
The Sierra Club years were different. I worked mostly in pencil and charcoal, occasionally in acrylics on canvas. When something was ready — or as ready as it was going to get — I'd photograph it and send it over. That was the whole pipeline. Nothing elaborate. The deadline made the decision for me: this is the version that gets published.
I've been trying to manufacture that same feeling in my own painting ever since.