Sharon Lamar of Swan Valley is an educator, watercolorist and children's author.

Through art, Lamar draws her Bigfork Elementary School first-graders into learning.

Education has been a big part of Lamar's life since she started teaching in 1975. She has taught at every grade level from preschool to college and only took a few years off when her first child, Annie, was born.

After her youngest child, Luke, went off to college, Lamar and her husband, Steve, had an empty nest. With some extra time she signed up for a watercolor class in 2005. The luminous quality and the way watercolor could capture light is what drew her to the medium.

"As I took more classes my style became one of detailed work, which the instructors kind of said something like ‘you're putting in too much detail. The joy of watercolor is free-flowing," Lamar said.

This did not deter her to continue her style of capturing native landscapes and wildlife realistically. Realism through watercolor was where she found joy.

Her favorite subject to paint is native wildflowers.

"I loved to do flowers," she said.

A painter friend asked her why she did not turn the watercolors into a children's book.

"That's how the idea really got planted," Lamar said, and she began compiling illustrations into a book.

Recently, Lamar's book, "Mountain Wildflowers for Young Explorers - An A to Z Guide," was published by Mountain Press Publishing.

Native subjects are her artistic inspiration because she had been incorporating them in science curriculum through outdoor education. Throughout the year, Lamar's first-graders look for birds, plants, trees, animal tracks and wildflowers such as arrowleaf, balsamroot, trillium, lupine, wild hyacinth and glacier lilies.

"We're a few blocks from Swan River. There are lots of wildflowers in the spring and they [students] go out and search for them," Lamar said. "Children get out in the natural world less and less. It's something they can be doing, experiencing, collecting and observing," she added.

Lamar has always used art to teach in the classroom. She makes drawings as visual aids in the classroom to teach different topics. She also has found a way to tie art and science together by touching on the plant cycle while students learn about artist Georgia O' Keeffe, a famous artist known for her paintings of flowers. Students then try their hand at painting flowers.

When she paints a flower it forces her to focus on the features.

"I can recognize any of the flowers I have painted," she said.

When not teaching, painting or writing Lamar spends time hiking, canoeing and vegetable gardening. In October she was a presenter at the Montana Festival of the Book.

Reporter Hilary Matheson may be reached at 758-4431 or by email at hmatheson@dailyinterlake.com.