Allow me introduce myself. My name is Shelby Pothier, I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I love to make art. There are all sorts of other things that I love, but let’s just talk about the art for now. I’ve been doing it in some form or another for my entire life. Unfortunately, I haven’t always been the best at consistently doing that, mostly because life just sort of has a way of happening. I’ve never really had a home on the internet besides Facebook or Instagram, and those just aren’t doing it for me anymore, so I decided to carve out a space of my own. It’s a place I can show off what I’m doing, share what I’m thinking, and you can see where I’m traveling (though that’s not many places right now) and where you can get in touch with me if you want to reach out.
So, welcome to my new website! I aim to keep it updated fairly regularly, both with finished artwork, experiments with new media, scribbles in my sketchbook, and hopefully a travel photo or two.
I wanted to kick things off by sharing a little hike I went on this morning at a local trail that goes down to Puget Sound. We haven’t really done much hiking these days, from trying to be mindful of staying off crowded trails and away from hikers and out of small towns. But lately I’ve been dying to get out and paint on the beach, so I chose a wide, local trail to revisit and thought a Monday was as good a day as any to avoid the maximum amount of people.The tiny parking lot is also a good natural limiter of the number of people I might run into.
I packed my trailrunners, water, travel sketchbook and kit, and my favorite REI ultralight chair in my daypack and told Spenser I’d be home by lunch. It was just over a mile hike down to the beach, and I was greeted with a perfect view of wide open beach and Puget Sound as I passed under the railroad tracks.
The first view of the beach that you get 
Wide open beach! 
Most of my tools that I like to use. 
I love these trees on the trail
I found a nice spot to camp out and pulled out my sketchbook to get started. I felt more than a few pangs of sadness as I flipped through; last night when I was packing my daypack, I had grabbed a half-completed sketchbook to put in my bag. It has been on a lot of adventures with me from the last couple of years: Mexico, camping trips, island getaways… gosh it hurt to look back on some of those memories, knowing that I hadn’t added anything to it for so many months.
When I do a plein air sketch in my sketchbook, I normally start out with the pencil sketch to nail down the shape of the landscape.
Then I move on to the brush pen. Sometimes, when I’m sketching this is the last step that I’ll do in place. I want to make sure I capture the feel of the place with the pen even if I don’t have time to paint.
Today I had all the time in the world, though, so I added in the watercolor, and finished up with some extra micron details. When I decided I was finished, I packed up my gear, soaked up some more views and the perfect breeze, and hiked back up to the car to make it home by lunch time. I can’t think of a more perfect way to spend my morning!
Thanks for reading!
