Amanda Williams Art

Amanda Williams Art Amanda Marisa Williams is a self-taught illustrator and Jack-of-all-trades residing in Montréal, QC.

I just love when real landscape looks like a work of . This is one of the first prints I even attempted, based on pho...
09/01/2023

I just love when real landscape looks like a work of . This is one of the first prints I even attempted, based on photos I took at White Rocks Trail in Ivins, UT.

What do you think? Should I do a real edition of this one?

I'm very excited to announce that today, This Rough Magic is available for purchase! You can buy it right here! https://...
08/14/2023

I'm very excited to announce that today, This Rough Magic is available for purchase! You can buy it right here! https://bookshop.org/p/books/this-rough-magic-at-home-on-the-columbia-slough-nancy-henry/20201314?aid=94983&ean=9781736231692&listref=all-aristata-press-titles

I wanted to expose a little bit of my process for creating the cover, since it was probably almost as much work as all the illustrations put together... but so worth it! I'm a fairly beginner printmaker, so this sequence was really optimized for learning rather than efficiency! But here you go -- lots of sketching, in and out of photoshop, and even some VERY analog techniques like tracing on a light table, all to get us to a 4-block color print of the authors' cabin on the slough.

"We decided to trace the rugged lake perimeter, which horseshoes around a spit of forested land. Spring-planted water pl...
08/13/2023

"We decided to trace the rugged lake perimeter, which horseshoes around a spit of forested land. Spring-planted water plantains and sedges form a bright expanse of apple green, rimmed by willows and cattails…
"As we follow the shoreline, a few killdeers hop and fly ahead of us, searching for snails and spiders. They are newcomers here."
- Ch 24. Rewilding

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Seasonality again. For this last illustration, I really really wanted to include a red osier dogwood, a plant whose native range spans much of North America including the Columbia Slough watershed. If I had to choose a single species that symbolized hope in wetland remediation, it's this one. It holds up riverbanks and prevents erosion, it sequesters heavy metals, and it's a beautiful deep red color with striking white blossoms and berries. My first crack at it got the season wrong though, as lovely as they are, the blossoms weren't right for a scene that occurred in November. Just as well, because the white autumn berries are just as pretty.

"Scrap metal recycling, I learned, is a lucrative business. People and businesses sell all manner of scrap. They bring i...
08/13/2023

"Scrap metal recycling, I learned, is a lucrative business. People and businesses sell all manner of scrap. They bring in construction beams, metal plates, pipes, tubes, wiring, old automobiles, boat and railroad materials, radiators, aluminum siding, cans and lids, batteries and electronics, brass locks -- even tarnished silver flatware and jewelry. Lead and aluminum are the most common nonferrous scrapped metals."
- Ch 23. Heavy Metal -- A Slough Remediation Story

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Still not really a still-life artist, but we must be versatile sometimes. 😄

"For every dozen yards liberated, I hauled in compost, sand, straw, green mulch, and wood chips. Hoping to attract more ...
08/12/2023

"For every dozen yards liberated, I hauled in compost, sand, straw, green mulch, and wood chips. Hoping to attract more pollinators, I back-planted coneflowers, penstemon, milkweed, and phlox. Rosemary, thyme, oregano, sage, and lavender came next. Then Oregon grape, red osier dogwood, evergold sedge, pheasant grass, willows, aspens, red alders, white oaks, and ponderosa pines."
- Ch 22. The Territorial Imperative

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One of my challenges in illustrating this book is that I am NOT in Portland! But this book is very much of its place, with an awareness of species, ecosystem, and season. It's not actually enough for me to look up coneflowers and oregon grape and draw them. I had to consult with the authors -- the real botanical experts here -- and make sure that I was drawing things in the correct season, each plant looking the way it ought to look at a particular point in time. Here I tried to capture what this scene might look like around late spring/early summer. Hope I got it right!

"A stack of small firs and spruces poked out of the log crosshatch, dried needles still intact. 'It's a bunch of dried C...
08/12/2023

"A stack of small firs and spruces poked out of the log crosshatch, dried needles still intact. 'It's a bunch of dried Christmas trees!' I called. 'Woven through that structure.'
"'Good for fish,' said Bruce, barely glancing at it."
- Ch 21. Refugia in Four Parts

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Honestly, I'd never even heard of refugia before working on this book! If you are feeling a bit pessimistic about the world and need a pick-me-up, looking at the work going into Columbia Slough refugias and engineered log jams provides a glimmer of hope.

"From my sky bridge, I survey the dishevelment of the former Broadmoor Golf Course, closed six months before. The boarde...
08/11/2023

"From my sky bridge, I survey the dishevelment of the former Broadmoor Golf Course, closed six months before. The boarded-up clubhouse still stands, but a few hundred yards to the northesast, steam shovels knock over giant sequoias and dig a network of drainage ditches to prepare for the upcoming construction.
"The sight of so many uprooted giant sequoias appalls me. Many are nearly a hundred years old."
- Ch 20. Standing on the Sky Bridge

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A construction site is hardly what you'd consider a beautiful subject for illustration, but that's the nature of this book -- not everything in Columbia Slough is beautiful! Here reference photos are just loose references, it's the verbal description that matters, and can perhaps be best captured by a drawing that is not a perfectly literal, realistic representation of the place.

"This law, passed in 1972 by the Nixon administration, required developers to mitigate the loss of wetlands in one area ...
08/11/2023

"This law, passed in 1972 by the Nixon administration, required developers to mitigate the loss of wetlands in one area by creating compensatory wetlands elsewhere in the same watershed. This exchange is called wetland mitigation banking. On first read, I thought 'wetlands banking' referred to the mudbanks of the slough, but this is banking as in making deposits and withdrawals -- environmental transactions a bit akin to cap-and-trade carbon offsets.
"So Prologis bought the Broadmoor Golf Course not simply to build another warehouse, but to earn valuable credits by creating new wetlands in low-lying portions of the golf course."
- Ch 19. Green to Rough

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Honestly I kind of love that the act of carefully drawing something will make it beautiful in my eyes, even the most common, little-loved weeds.

"Dirt dribbled between my fingers. Billions of bacteria. Millions of fungal organisms. Microscopic masses of nematodes. ...
08/10/2023

"Dirt dribbled between my fingers. Billions of bacteria. Millions of fungal organisms. Microscopic masses of nematodes. Handfuls of earthworms. At my feet, a scurry of pill bugs, ants, millipedes, and springtails. A mini-verse of the seen and unseen gathered around a dead dog named Sadie. The whole gang there to welcome her back home and rearrange her complex molecules of fat, blood, and bone into fertile soil."
- Ch 18. What Gardens May Come

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In my childhood bedroom I had an embroidery that my mom made that was a cute, colorful, overall gorgeous collection of tons of creatures -- insect, reptile, mammal, you name it -- on and around a glorious big green tree. Really all I had to do was translate the same idea into pen and ink, and make it fit a more horizontal aspect ratio. Thanks for the inspo, mom!

"Daniel Pop was fishing the slough in 2012 when he landed a large sucker fish off Kelley Point. He'd often cast a line t...
08/10/2023

"Daniel Pop was fishing the slough in 2012 when he landed a large sucker fish off Kelley Point. He'd often cast a line there since immigrating from Romania nineteen years earlier. That day, an environmental scientist from Columbia Riverkeeper approached him and offered to buy his sucker fish for testing. Pop readily agreed, adding that he and other fishers ignored the posted fish warning signs.
"In an Oregonian interview Pop theorized that he and other immigrants fished the slough because they were used to muddy freshwater fish. 'You want a taste that reminds you of your country,' he said."
- Ch 17. Bioaccumulation is a Bitch

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Ages ago I used to live in Long Beach, CA. I used to see trash wash up on the beaches and I knew there were oil rigs not too far off shore. Like the Columbia Slough, we see signs on all the piers not to eat the fish you catch, and much like Daniel Pop, there are always people fishing there who don't heed the signs. It's a tough sell, trying to convince people that PCBs and mercury in their fish will hurt them in the long run, when groceries are expensive today.

"Crows once had friends in high places. They served the gods. The Norse God Odin had two ravens (crows on steroids) as d...
08/09/2023

"Crows once had friends in high places. They served the gods. The Norse God Odin had two ravens (crows on steroids) as divine advisers -- Hugin (thought) and Munin (memory). These cunning corvids kept an eye on the troublesome mortals. Just as they spy on us still, ever on the lookout for some edible scraps."

"I tried this joke on one. 'What does a French crow sound like?' I asked. Silence. 'PourCUAWWW! PourCUAWWW!' I shouted. The crow fled up into a cottonwood."
- Ch 16. Citizen Crow: Up to No Good

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For several illustrations, but this one in particular, I put in a lot of background work just improving my grasp of anatomy and proportion of birds. So many birds -- honestly super fun to draw. In the end, my favorite mental image of the chapter was really about ravens, not crows, but I couldn't get away from the idea of Thought and Memory watching us always and submitting our deeds for judgment.

"After settling into our new home, I began to study the slough's history as an open sewer, toxic waste dump, and reposit...
08/09/2023

"After settling into our new home, I began to study the slough's history as an open sewer, toxic waste dump, and repository of chemical-laden stormwater. I learned that sediments, even more than water, trap and hold onto the poisons of industry and farming. The worst of these were the notoriously tenacious PCBs (poly-chlorinated biphenyls), compounds of highly toxic organic chlorine. PCBs were created in the 1920s and widely used as machinery lubricants and coolants until they were banned in 1979."
- Ch 15. Stuck in the Mud

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Warning: the last image in this carousel is a little risqué, swipe at your own risk! 😅

"PCB Pete" was a total departure from the style and type of subject that I drew for most of the chapter headings. It took a lot of tries to make a character that both looked plausibly like.a poly-chlorinated biphenyl molecule AND like an evil little menace. And then to make a character with a. very vertical body work in a horizontal chapter header. For that last bit, I drew inspiration from a pretty weird place. Yknow that famous photo of Burt Reynolds? Yeah THAT one, with the bear-skin rug. PCB Pete is a saucy guy, what can I say.

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