How I Gather Reference Material: Wildflowers, Trail Cameras & Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride

People occasionally ask where I find the reference material for my woodland paintings.

The short answer is: I married a Montana man.

My husband is in the mountains as often as life allows. He scouts, studies terrain, sets up trail cameras, camps and quietly gathers information for his next hunt. These are serious expeditions involving maps, weather patterns, animal tracks and carefully chosen observation points.

I use them to photograph flowers.

While he surveys the landscape for signs of elk and deer, I am studying the dewdrops gathered on pine needles, attempting to capture a rabbit mid-flight and reminding myself that there are far more shades of green than any paint palette could reasonably contain.

All of this happens from the passenger seat

of a ridiculously loud and bumpy side-by-side, driven by a man I have affectionately begun to think of as Mr. Toad.

One moment we are roaring up the side of a mountain while birds, rabbits and deer scatter out of our path. The next, I am hollering for him to stop because I have spotted a particularly magnificent thistle.

And strangely—wonderfully—he always does.

He waits quite happily while I climb out with my Canon and collect my specimens: the curl of a fern, the shape of a pine branch, the colors hidden inside a patch of moss or the way sunlight settles across the grasses. Then I climb back in, brace myself and off we go again.

Today’s collection began with a foggy forest morning left behind by last night’s storm. The rain had created a net of diamonds over every leaf, blade of grass and pine needle. Thistles stood everywhere, their purple crowns bright against the damp green landscape.

And the smell.

Pine, wet wood and warming grasses as the sun began to break through the clouds. It was the kind of fragrance you wish you could bottle and carry home—not only to remember the mountain, but to somehow place it inside a painting.

Then we stumbled across a meadow that hardly looked real.

It was tucked into one small corner of the mountain, surrounded by moss-covered logs and giant pines. Every wildflower the mountain had ever made seemed to be growing there together. Raindrops clung to the petals and leaves until the entire meadow looked jewel-encrusted.

It was a fairy garden without any need for fairies.

I stood there taking far too many photographs, already imagining pieces of it appearing in future paintings: a cluster of flowers beside a fox, dew-covered grasses beneath a rabbit or that misty forest becoming the background of some quiet woodland scene.

That is how much of my artwork begins—not with a perfectly planned composition, but with something small that makes me ask Mr. Toad to slam on the brakes.

A flower. A feather. A peculiar mushroom. Light coming through wet pine branches.

These excursions give me more than photographs. They remind me how wild and wonderfully detailed creation is. They teach me to notice—to look closely enough to see the tiny worlds hidden beneath the trees and to remember that no green is simply green.

My husband may come home with information for his next hunt.

I come home with hundreds of photographs, muddy shoes, pockets full of inspiration and the certainty that I could spend an entire lifetime painting the woods and never run out of things to discover.

I truly cannot make this whimsical, ridiculous life up.

And honestly, I wouldn’t change it for anything.