As an industrial designer, islander Bill Knox has designed everything from buttons to battleships. As an artist, he has worked in multiple media from chalk to oil, but since moving to Vashon 50 years ago, Knox’s medium of choice has been transparent watercolor. Asked to be one of the six commissioned artists for Vashon Allied Arts’ auction, “Vive La France,” Knox said he plans to submit a watercolor with the title “Guests for Dinner.”

The painting depicts a silver salmon caught in the talons of a bald eagle with crows — as the uninvited guests — “mobbing” the raptor overhead.

“I try to give my work a little story,” Knox said. “I was in a Wyoming wildlife competition and showed a painting of a moose with a redwing blackbird giving the moose a bad time.”

It is clear that Knox likes pulling a leg or two. When asked his age, he replied he is old — “old as dirt.” He calls himself a “hack illustrator,” not an artist, though he graduated from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, where he first learned the techniques of watercolor.

He said he doesn’t paint every day, and believes it takes working eight hours a day to be a real artist, which is why he calls himself a hack. But not everyone agrees with Knox’s self-assessment; his watercolors have won numerous wildlife stamp competitions, and islanders who visited Barnworks over the years will recognize his art with its nature-based subject matter.

“I get inspired by something in nature and then paint it. I have a converted bedroom, which is my studio,” Knox said, adding with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, “and my desk has a lot of cat hair on it.”