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- I'm kind of amazed at the Oregon Coast.
The tide is constantly changing;
the beach itself is constantly changing.
There's an endless parade of things going on
in the natural world here.
JULE GILFILLAN: For most of us,
this clump of washed-up kelp is kind of a stinky eyesore.
But to Nora Sherwood...
This habitat right now, you know,
its life as a plant is over,
but there's a whole world in there.
Nora's the kind of artist whose work
you're as likely to find in a textbook as a gallery.
We were the ones who enjoyed the dissections,
bones, skulls, guts, you know, whatever it is.
Like, oh, wow, that's really cool.
That weird crew.
[ laughs ]
So I know these look silly.
I always try to remember to take them off
before I go and answer the door.
[ laughs ]
But they're very useful,
especially for this kind of work.
Nora's lived in Lincoln City full time since 2014.
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I'm from planet Earth.
My father, he's a retired foreign service diplomat,
so I was born in Colombia.
We were in Finland, Sweden, and then Chile.
And then I graduated from high school in Spain,
at which point I came back to the U.S. to go to college.
So this is going to be a little bit of a sallow study
so that you can identify the leaf.
And then I'm going to add the very tiny pink bloom.
So I'm going to get the entire area wet,
and then you kind of watch it
for when the sheen is gone, but it's still damp.
Yep, there we are.
Okay, so then I'm going to use this paint,
and I'm just going to spread it on lightly everywhere.
What's so cool is to lay in more color while it's still wet,
just watch the color disperse.
Yeah, yeah, I like it.
I like those moments
sometimes when something just really works.
One of the things about a science illustrator
is we're not married to a medium.
So I just keep using whatever media is necessary
to get it to look like I want it to look.
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I do a lot of work in colored pencil
and it's just amazing for showing shininess in bugs.
And a lot of color theory goes into that.
That's a lot of what makes that realistic,
is understanding how to use complements and triads
to darken a primary color.
And I'm going to go over all of these with their complements
to get it to roll back down.
I was in high tech and I was enjoying my career
but I just really felt like I was ready
for something different.
I just, you know, life is long and you need a few chapters.
And the thing that I kept coming back to
was a zoology class and how much I enjoyed that.
But to build a new career,
Nora had to study both art and scientific illustration.
That was very difficult, because I'm not an artist.
I wasn't an artist.
I guess I'm an artist now. [ laughs ]
Before I was not an artist.
But I really believe in the 10,000-hour concept.
It's not talent, it's hard work
and a deep desire to learn how to do it.
And at the end of the day,
it was all about trying to figure out how to see.
I can literally remember the moment when I was able
to get my brain to quiet and actually draw what I saw.
And it was a chocolate chip sea star.
So I was looking at that sea star arm.
It was a foreshortened view,
and I was trying to draw it, trying to draw it.
And all of a sudden it was, like, oh!
I have to draw it like that.
So I'm working on a slimy cap mushroom.
And so I'm trying to get scratchboard
to look wet and slimy.
The scratchboard is coated with ink and reverses
the usual relationship between light and dark.
Rather than applying media, you're actually removing media.
So every time you remove media, you're bringing things closer.
and my favorite implement is the good old X-Acto knife.
One of the things that I really wanted to do
in becoming a science illustrator
was to illustrate the natural world
to try to get people to think more deeply
about what we're doing with our natural world
and the fact that we are abusing it and it's going away.
You know, it's going away.
I can definitely just sit here and do this for hours.
It would make some people just nuts, but I really like it.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
This new project is a commission
for cinnamon teal lifting off from water.
Half of my time is spent just looking
for useable reference images.
Okay, so, yay.
Here is a cinnamon teal.
He's a little bit too deep into the process,
but that's going to be a helpful image for sure.
So I have a feeling I'm going to, like, take a mallard
and turn him into a cinnamon teal.
But I think I'll just look for other ducks
to help me figure out what to do.
And I don't -- oh, wow, look at that, common merganser take off.
Oh! Oh my gosh!
Look it, the feet are just barely going into
the first big run that they're going to use to take off.
That is gorgeous.
I always go to the Slater Museum.
They have a bird tails and feathers database.
[ birds chirping ]
It just kind of soothes my eyeballs
to have this much green around me.
Yeah, so this is Sitka spruce cones.
And we have a lot of Douglas squirrels here
that eat the seeds out of these.
So the false lily, it's evergreen, it's here year round,
and it has this lovely heart-shaped leaf.
It'll have little, tiny white flowers,
and they're absolutely gorgeous.
One thing that I really love
is we have lots of rough-skinned newts that come through here.
And they just tromp right by the house
with their bright orange undersides.
This is a fabulous quote from Baba Dioum,
who was the Senegalese forester:
"In the end we will conserve only what we love,
we will love only what we understand,
and we will understand only what we are taught."
And I think a picture is worth a thousand words.
So I'm just doing my tiny little bit
to get people to think about the natural world.