It's time to move on to Molly Hashimoto's next course for mastering your sketching, painting, and drawing of birds you can spot in national parks in the West.

Her previous work, Colors Of The West, An Artist’s Guide To Nature’s Palette, divided parks and their birds by colors. 

She conveyed green, for instance, through a tranquil watercolor of a canoe at dock on the shore of Diablo Lake in North Cascades National Park (at the North Cascades Institute’s Environmental Learning Center). Blue came across via the tranquil waters of Lake Crescent, with the mountains of Olympic National Park slowly vanishing into the distance.

Gold showed up in both the rockscape of Pompeys Pillar National Monument in Montana and the North Entrance archway to Yellowstone National Park. Ms. Hashimoto showed off the Painted Hills of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument and Pinnacles National Park, among others, for red, while the cliffs of Bandelier National Monument and the Orange Spring Mound in Yellowstone helped her define orange.

Violet, not too surprisingly if you’ve visited this park, was captured in the wildflowers of Mount Rainier National Park as well as via the view of the mountain from Berkeley Park, and through a meadow of lupines at North Cascades.

That was a year ago. Her latest work focuses on, if you will, birds you can spot in Western parks. Ms. Hashimoto takes us to wetlands and ponds, seashores and lakeshores, into meadows and across grasslands, into desert and sagebrush, and even into alpine areas to capture winged creatures with her paint brush and sketch materials, and then explains to us the techniques she employs to generate these beautiful images.

As she did in Colors of the West, Ms. Hashimoto drops in some art history and natural history in helping us gain a better appreciation for winged creatures found in the parks and the talents of artists who bring them to life.

"The Renaissance marked an awakening to the wonders of nature that was crucial to the development of both science and art," she explains. "The discoveries of the New World prompted a new interest in the natural world as explorers returned with objects never before seen and scientists collected and attempted to categorize them."

While reading that passage, your eyes can't help but be drawn to Ms. Hashimoto's watercolor sketches of Tufted puffins on the page.

Head deeper into this book and more art lessons are interspersed among alluring images of sandhill cranes, White-faced ibis, Oystercatchers, herons, egrets, and more "captured" in parks such as North Cascades, Mount Rainier, and Yellowstone. To help those looking to emulate her images, Ms. Hashimoto in an appendix points to the art materials and suppliers she prefers to use.

This is a handy book to have in your parks library not only to use as a guide for improving your own sketches, but to deepen your knowledge on the natural history and wildlife of the West's national parks.

Traveler bonus: Listen to our interview with Molly Hashimoto on Episode 10 of our weekly podcast series.