Sketching at Fakahatchee

Fakahatchee field trip

This past Saturday, I had the opportunity to visit the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park again as part of the En Plein Air event for April. This trip, we visited a disused remnant of Old U.S. 41 (also known as the Tamiami Trail), just north of the newer road. The remnant of road borders a canal and looks out over a marsh prairie habitat. As we traveled down the old road, a swallow-tailed kite swooped overhead, diving low enough for me to glimpse bright eyes and feather details.

We stopped at an old concrete bridge where the vista opened up. This part of the park has a different feeling from the cypress strands I visited before; the sky seems to extend infinitely above a vast expanse of grasses. It was a sunny day, and warm, with a breeze that kept the mosquitoes and some of the deerflies away.

Two of us settled down to draw and paint our surroundings, after our Park Ranger guide showed us some potential spots. Our choices included a buttonwood forest at the end of the road, an open canal lined with cattails, a variety of roadside shrubs and trees, and the prairie marsh. Our guide joined us to sketch after conducting more participants to our location. One of them included a flautist, and we enjoyed her music as it mingled with the wind rustling the grasses and dry palm fronds. What a wonderful experience!

Our explorations yielded some interesting discoveries: an empty Florida apple snail shell, black vulture feathers scattered along the roadside, a water snake shedding its skin, and a wooden framework under the concrete bridge, which may have been the original structure. We saw green buttonwoods, wax myrtles, red mangroves, airplants (Tillandsia utriculata), a snowy egret, great blue heron, turkey and black vultures, and a raccoon ambling across the mud flats under the cattails.

It was a beautiful day, and a happy accident that our planned plein air sketching coincided with the 31st Worldwide SketchCrawl. If you’d like to see photos from the past art events at Fakahatchee, please click on the events tab just under the top banner. A warm thank you to everyone who joined us!

You can click on the caption of the top image to view it on my Flickr photostream.

Apple snail studies

Apple snail studies, originally uploaded by Elizabeth Smith.

This empty snail shell was found in a ditch near some woods in town, and although I know it’s an apple snail, I’m not sure which one it is. Florida has one native species of apple snail,  and several invasive species –causing concern among biologists and farmers. The invasive species are probably released from home aquariums. Apple snails are popular in the aquarium trade because they’re attractive and are effective tank cleaners.

Apple snails are the largest freshwater snails on earth; the snail shell I sketched is about 3 inches long! The fact I find most interesting about these snails is their breathing structures. Some snails have gills, and some have lungs, while some (like the apple snail) have both gills AND lungs. Having both breathing arrangements allows them to successfully weather our wet and dry seasons. The Florida apple snail is the main food for the limpkin and the Florida snail kite, an endangered species. No wonder biologists are concerned over the nonnative invaders.

I sketched this shell from several different angles with a Sakura Micron Pigma sepia color pen with an 01 point. Lately, I’ve found myself sketching directly with ink more often, bypassing the preliminary pencil lines. It’s very freeing (once you get over the initial *yikes* factor), and I find that with a fine point and hatch lines, my false starts fade into the rest of the drawing. Anyway, I hope you get a more immediate connection to my subject with this method – unfortunately, I find that the more detail I add, the tighter my drawing gets. Some days I find it very difficult to loosen up my drawing style.  There's always next time!

If you’re interested in reading more about these snails, please visit these additional links:

Technical Bulletin on Apple Snails from the Commissioner of Agriculture (PDF)

USGS (United States Geologic Survey), about the Florida apple snail (PDF).

You can click on the caption of the top image to visit it on my Flickr photostream.