Javelinas and a hawk

I’ve started scanning my sketches from last month’s teaching trip in Tucson, and I thought I’d start with two that are quite opposite in terms of process.

Let’s begin with the javelinas that I sketched one morning up at the old homestead at Tanque Verde Ranch. Every Sunday morning there’s an outdoor pancake breakfast up there, and no doubt the small herd of javelinas set their Apple watches to arrive up there just in time for leftovers. Javelinas are such funny creatures. From the side, they have big round bodies but from the front they are quite flattened and narrow. Add short legs to that and you have a classic cartoon animal.

I drew these quick sketches as the javelinas snuffled around the trash bins looking for bits of pancake and hash browns. They were moving around quite a bit as I tried to capture their hairy bodies, flat snouts and short legs. My tools were a water-soluble Pilot pen, a water brush and my watercolour sketchbook.

On our last afternoon of the workshop, some of my participants participated in a falconry session (no hunting involved) at the ranch. Jeffrey (or Geoffrey??) the Harris’s Hawk arrived with his handler, and of course the rest of my group watched the session from an outdoor terrace above our classroom. We were quite lucky to have the hawk land on a railing right in front of us for a few seconds at a time before the handler signalled it to come back. I took a few photos of this majestic bird, and even though I didn’t get a chance to sketch it on location, I wanted it to have a spot in my sketchbook.

This time the process was very different. I could observe its shape and its colouring as well as spend a longer time painting it. I’m happy I was able to sketch it.

Even though both of these pages are very different, they have the same importance for me in my travel sketchbook — both are great records of wonderful experiences that were unique to that place.