Susan Bourdet calendars bring luminous watercolor artistry into daily planning through paintings that combine realistically detailed birds and animals with soft, impressionistic backgrounds that engage viewer imagination as much as visual accuracy. Working in watercolor for its spontaneous, fluid qualities, Bourdet has developed a distinctive technique over many years where realistic subjects emerge from free flowing backgrounds that imply rather than describe setting, creating images where color and intensity invite viewers to complete the scene in their own minds. Her work balances two great loves she struggled for years to combine: art and biology. This fusion manifests in calendars that satisfy both scientific observation and aesthetic beauty, whether through the Songbirds wall calendar featuring avian portraits that bird watchers appreciate for accuracy and art lovers admire for composition, or the Hummingbirds wall calendar capturing the jewel-like iridescence and impossible hovering grace of these tiny creatures. Her journey from doing ink illustrations for the Portland zoo newsletter to international recognition through Wild Wings publishing and exhibitions at venues including the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum demonstrates how patience, observation, and willingness to trust spontaneous watercolor techniques can create artwork that captures fleeting moments of sunlight and shadow in the natural world.

About Artist Susan Bourdet

Susan Bourdet's path to becoming a celebrated wildlife artist wasn't straightforward. For many years, through college and beyond, she struggled to combine her two great loves: art and biology. When her two children were small, she began doing ink illustrations for the Portland zoo newsletter, which led her to incorporate watercolor and full backgrounds into her work. Her paintings were discovered in a Portland gallery by Wild Wings, which has published her limited editions for twenty years. Her work gained international recognition through three calendar titles published annually by Lang, and her original paintings can be found in collections worldwide. She's been featured in shows and exhibitions all over the country, including the prestigious Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum's Birds in Art and the Society of Animal Artists' Art and the Animal. Beyond creating art, Susan enjoys sharing her unique methods and insights in workshops. She's authored two Northlight instructional books on watercolor, Painting the Allure of Nature and Capturing the Magic of Light, and has been featured in two Creative Catalyst instructional videos. Her approach to watercolor celebrates what she finds most expressive about the medium: creating work with watercolor paper soaking wet, allowing pigments to blend and flow without edges. While realistic parts of her paintings accurately describe subjects, the free flowing backgrounds focus on color and intensity, engaging viewer imagination rather than providing literal descriptions of background shapes.

Songbirds: Celebrating Avian Beauty

The Songbirds wall calendar showcases Bourdet's ability to render birds with both scientific accuracy and artistic sensitivity, capturing not just physical characteristics but the personality and spirit of different species. Also available in vertical format for narrow wall spaces, this collection brings the vibrant beauty and abundant bird life of the Pacific Northwest into planning throughout the year. For comprehensive organization alongside avian artistry, the Songbirds planner provides extensive scheduling space, while the two year planner extends planning capabilities even further for people who organize well in advance. The monthly pocket planner brings portable songbird beauty to on-the-go scheduling. These calendars appeal to birders who appreciate accurate depictions of species they observe in nature, backyard bird enthusiasts who feed and watch songbirds throughout seasons, and anyone drawn to the cheerful presence and melodious voices that make songbirds such beloved neighbors in gardens and wild spaces alike.

Hummingbirds: Capturing Jeweled Flight

The Hummingbirds wall calendar demonstrates Bourdet's particular skill at capturing subjects that are never still for long. Hummingbirds present unique challenges for wildlife artists because capturing them requires many hours in the field with camera and telephoto lens. The resulting photos rarely catch the subject in focus or in good setting, but they do catch the pose and light that become the basis for paintings. Bourdet then creates believable environments for her subjects, often placing hummingbirds among garden flowers or realistically rendered wild plants, finding weathered textures of rock, old wood, and bark to contrast with the softness of feathers and petals. Her approach to painting these impossibly fast, iridescent creatures results in images that convey both their jewel-like beauty and their restless energy. The challenge lies in suggesting motion while maintaining enough clarity for viewers to appreciate anatomical details and the remarkable color shifts that occur as light hits hummingbird plumage from different angles. For people who plant hummingbird gardens, hang feeders, and wait patiently for these tiny visitors, this calendar provides year round celebration of creatures that seem more fairy tale than biology.

Cats in the Country: Rural Feline Life

The Cats in the Country wall calendar, also available in vertical format, explores feline subjects within rural and garden settings that reflect Bourdet's Pacific Northwest surroundings. These aren't studio cat portraits but paintings that place cats within the landscapes they inhabit, whether prowling through gardens, resting in weathered barns, or surveying territory from fence posts and stone walls. Her background in biology informs how she paints cats moving through actual environments rather than posed against generic backgrounds. The impressionistic settings she creates through her watercolor technique suit cats particularly well, as anyone who's watched cats knows they exist in partly mysterious realms, appearing and disappearing, fully present one moment and utterly absorbed in invisible stimuli the next. These calendars appeal to cat lovers who appreciate seeing felines depicted within the rural and garden contexts where many cats spend their days, and to anyone who values artwork acknowledging that domestic animals remain connected to landscape and season even when living alongside humans.

Why People Choose Susan Bourdet for Nature Planning

Susan Bourdet has built devoted following because her calendars successfully merge scientific observation with artistic interpretation, creating wildlife paintings that satisfy both the naturalist's desire for accuracy and the art lover's appreciation for technique, composition, and emotional resonance. Her background straddling art and biology ensures her work appeals to people who want their wildlife imagery grounded in actual observation rather than generic prettiness. The fact that Wild Wings has published her limited editions for twenty years and Lang has published three calendar titles annually demonstrates sustained market validation, while exhibitions at prestigious venues like the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum confirm serious artistic merit. Her distinctive watercolor technique, working with paper soaking wet to create those impressionistic backgrounds, gives her work recognizable style that stands apart from more conventional wildlife illustration. She lives and works in the Pacific Northwest, and that abundant bird life and vibrant beauty of gardens she and her husband have created as backyard oasis for migratory songbirds infuses her work with authentic sense of place. For people who maintain bird feeders, plant wildlife gardens, observe seasonal migrations, and find daily joy in watching nature just outside their windows, Susan Bourdet calendars provide planning tools that reflect these values and interests. Her work appeals to those who understand that capturing birds requires not just artistic skill but patience, field time, and genuine fascination with subjects that won't hold still, affirming that the effort to capture fleeting moments of sunlight and shadow in the natural world produces artwork worth living with throughout changing seasons.