Playing catch up with the Wild Wonder Conference recorded classes. Sushma Hegde taught us a playful approach to painting trees and foliage using a broader palette of colors.
wwc26: beyond green in foliage
Month: September 2026
Phelsuma laticauda
Home from Hawai’i. I saw lots of fabulous plants and waterfalls, but the most memorable animal was the gold dust day gecko, Phelsuma laticauda. This, I now realize, is the gecko anthropormorphized as the mascot for GEICO insurance (though for some reason they disregarded the bright blue eye ring when they made that CGI critter).
petroglyphs
I have a friend who often plans her road and camping trips around hot springs. I’ve often thought I’d like to plan mine around petroglyphs and pictographs. So I was very happy to discover there were petroglyphs in walking distance of our camp site.
We also visited Lahaina, which is showing little recovery from the devastating wildfire of August 2023. But there’s still some good restaurants in town.
Maui chickens
The Hawaiian islands are home to large populations of feral chooks. While chickens have existed in Hawaii for centuries, their dramatic population boom is quite recent. Hurricanes in 1982 and 1992 destroyed thousands of chicken coops, allowing domesticated birds to escape into the wild, where they interbred with ancient junglefowl (brought by the Polynesians 1000 years ago).
With warm weather, plentiful food, and few predators, chooks have established themselves as a happy feral population. On Maui, the only wild predator is the mongoose, who eats their eggs. This mammal doesn’t live on Kauaʻi, so the chickens are even more widespread on that island.
We spent the last two nights in a tent cabin at Camp Olowalu, where the plentiful roosters woke us at 4am. But at least there were no noisy humans there.
Pipturus albidus
maui
wwc26: gouache landscape
Merel Hoekstra taught a class on painting small landscapes with gouache. Every time I use this medium I think I’d like to get better at it, but just haven’t (yet) put in the hours.
wwc26: haiku nature comics
Grant Snider encouraged us to create haiku comics (haikomics), so I turned a lunch time experience into a comic strip.
wwc26: adding character to animals
Animator and illustrator Chloe Peters gave us tips on adding character to animals without making them too cartoony.
wwc26: explore scale & volume with pen & ink
The 8th Annual Wild Wonder Conference has begun! First class was with Mark Simmons, who encouraged us to dive right in with pen.
