October 2024
This little cottontail rabbit was carved out of basswood with hand and power tools. I used Frank Russell's power carving video: Fur, Feathers, and Fins, as a guide. I learned quite a bit about technique, especially how to texture fur and insert glass eyes and eyelids. I painted the rabbit with acrylic paint. I've done several rabbits over the years, most I have given away to family.
October 2024
The Killdeer is one of my favorite birds. I became acquainted with them growing up as a boy in Yellowstone. These larger plovers nested on the ground out in plain sight among the sagebrush and rocks. Thus, their eggs and young were fairly easy to find. When I approached nest the adult killdeer would pretend to be wounded and flutter along the ground just ahead with a plaintiff cry to draw me away from the nest. They are a uniquely striped bird.
This was carved by hand with a little help from power tools from basswood, which does not lend itself well to power carving. I painted it with acrylic paints and made the legs and feet out of wire covered with QuickWood.
SEPT 2020
I painted this in oil from a picture that I took in the early spring of 2023. I did a little Bob Ross technique with this one. I've got work to do to make the clouds more realistic. The view supposed to be from the Wasatch Front, high enough that I could look down through pine trees toward the 11,000 foot mountain. The Provo River can be seen at the lower left, and comes down through the Provo Canyon and out onto the valley flat.
Timpanogos has also long been a tradition in our family. My father, Lowell Biddulph, grew up in Provo and climbed Timpanogos 21 times by the time he was 18-years of age. He loved this mountain, and it was here that he cultivated his love for hiking and mountain climbing, something he passed on to his children.
July 2024
This is another effort at painting the Grand Tetons. I did this more as an exercise in painting. This is meant to be a fall painting with the golden aspen trees mixed in with the dark evergreens. The higher peaks and cirques are already beginning to accumulate snow.
Painted in June 2024 at my home in Provo, Utah. I used a painting on-line as a model for my painting. Done in oil. I began this painting trying to use Bob Ross's painting style, but I discovered that the complexities of edges, shadows, and such, along with my lack of expertise in this method made it difficult. So, I resorted to brush instead of knife. I'll keep trying.
I grew up on the Idaho side of the Teton Range. I love the Tetons and its foliage and wildlife. The Jackson Hole side, with the Snake River flowing through, brings back the Old West in me. I love the hushed, secluded meadows in pine forests, and the flowing streams, all punctuated by the great peaks.
15 June 2023
For more than 25 years (1945-1968), our family occupied a little brown cottage on the shores of Yellowstone Lake. It built in 1930 as an annex to the trailside museum, and is located just east of the current Visitor Center at Fishing Bridge. We spent every summer from 1st of June to end of August living in the little cottage. Cooking and heating was done on a large Majestic wood-burning stove, and telephone contact was by a 1900 Kellogg magneto crank telephone. Today, the cottage, along with the Visitor Center, are on the national historic register of buildings in Yellowstone. The Visitor Center, which was one of four original trailside museums constructed in Yellowstone in 1929-1930, was completely renovated and updated in 2020-2023.
For my sister's 80th birthday, I did the top wood-burning image of the old cottage the way it used to be when the two large lodgepole pine trees were out front and the courtyard was surrounded by a wooden fence with a gate. It was done on a 6"x 6" piece of Basswood. I colored the roof shingles with an oil paint stick. I wanted to have one for myself, so, I did another image (the bottom larger photo) on the same size piece of wood. The fence around the court is a little more to correct perspective.
