Sophie Webb
Sophie Webb
Ornithologist, Artist, & Author
All my life I have loved nature and art. The result: that for years I have traveled and worked as a field biologist. This has become an integral part of my art work: seeing the wildlife, birds in particular, that I paint and draw. The basis of almost all my work is observation and field sketching, combined occasionally with museum specimens; in particular for the field guide plates that I paint.
My travels as a biologist and artist studying and painting birds have taken me from the Amazon to the Arctic and Antarctic. In 1995 I co-authored and illustrated A Guide to the Birds of Mexico and Northern Central America with Steve Howell. I continue to work on field guides, a few plates here and there for a variety of neotropical bird guides and most recently I illustrated forty species of marine mammal for a Field Guide to the Marine Mammals of the Pacific Coast.
While working in the Antarctic and at sea on research vessels I started writing and illustrating children’s books. They are modified journals of projects I have worked on illustrated with pencil sketches and watercolor and gouache paintings. So far I have completed three: My Season with Penguins: An Antarctic Journal about studying Adélie Penguins in the Antarctic, where I worked for 5 seasons, Looking for Seabirds: Journal from an Alaskan Voyage, about studying seabirds in the Aleutian Islands Alaska, and newly published in June 2011, Far from Shore: Chronicles of an Open Ocean Voyage, about studying dolphins, seabirds and the ecosystem of the Eastern Tropical Pacific.
I love being on the ocean and have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to work on numerous cruises either as a researcher or naturalist in the Central Pacific, Eastern Tropical Pacific, Atlantic, Antarctic, Aleutians, Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea. I am a director of Oikonos: Ecosystem Knowledge and research associate of PRBO Conservation Science and a some time employee of NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center.
Sophie Webb Official Website