Sara’s Introduction

Hello fellow flora enthusiasts! I moved to Fairbanks last August from Georgia and have been fascinated with the plant and animal life in the interior since moving here. I work as a freelance illustrator, mostly creating educational work for SciComm, museums, and children’s books on a wide variety of topics including wildlife, archaeology, and astronomy.

I love the large variety of moss and lichens here in a beautiful rainbow of colors. I also love wildflowers and have been very excited to see them popping up all over the place in the last week. The high prevalence of birch has also been fascinating to me, its so visually striking, especially in the fall! Additionally, I keep a small indoor garden of herbs and greens in the winter. I expand this to a larger container garden of mostly veggies and berries during the summer. I’m hoping to expand my knowledge of plant life here in Alaska to enrich my time spent outdoors (I do a lot of hiking and camping) and allow me to better understand the anatomy of plants when I draw them. I look forward to learning with you all!

For reference I’ve got the Easy-Marco lens for my smartphone as I thought it would be the easiest one to have on me while hiking. I did some tests with it on some objects at home and it does remarkably well. I’m planning to prop it up between two books for marco shots during dissection.

5 Comments

  1. Welcome Sara,
    yes, the colors here in Alaska are amazing, stunning sunsets, the changing fall colors, and the tundra coming alive with wildflowers, of course not to forget the spectacular colors of the Aurora Borealis. I love your alpine azalea picture. There have been some changes to the names of this plant, so now it is called Kalmia procumbens based on genetic evidence. It was known before as Loiseleuria procumbens, now considered a synonym. Last year during lockdown I dissected some of these from Murphy Dome, shows the floral parts well. I am glad you like the easy macrolens, I find it works well and is slim so easy to cary with the phone. Have fun exploring the flora with us and show us some of your art work.

  2. Thank you for sharing those dissection photos, they are amazing! It’s so interesting how species names change as new things are learned. I grew up thinking those names were static and set in stone, but there is always some flux in the natural sciences!

  3. Awesome! These are great illustrations! Thanks for sharing. Are you using collages or is it a digital collage style? Very cool, I also visited your website. We always need somebody to illustrate something for us for some grants, so I will keep you in mind. I have an idea for a card game for berry identification in Alaska, maybe we can work on something together. Great stuff!

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