
I did this while waiting for the take-out to come. As soon as I laid the last wash, the man handed me the bags and off I went. Perfect timing. There’s always the fear lurking that I won’t have time to finish a sketch, with the subject walking off or something or other.


As I was walking to work this morning through our urban/suburban neighborhood I heard a rustling to my right. I turned to see something astonishing: a bird flying away with another bird gripped below it. It looked almost like a big ball of flapping feathers. The next second I realized it was a young, fairly small red tailed hawk lifting a pigeon across the street and up to a nearby tree. Both birds were about the same size, with the hawk having something like a two-foot wing span, about half the size of most adult red tailed hawks in this part of the world. The hawk landed in the tree limbs up about 15 feet above me and started to tear the pigeon apart, eating it. I pulled out my sketchbook and started to draw what I saw. The sketch below it was from memory as it flew past my shoulder on its way to the tree. I was treated to my own personal National Geographic special in the middle of the city.

I was wanting to draw a person, but everyone in my family had gone to bed. Then I turned and saw myself in the mirror in our dining room. I had to stoop to see my face and thought it was an interesting composition. This is the fist time I’ve drawn myself in a long time, like a couple decades or so… I don’t know why or why not, in this case. I’m trying out a Micron 02 pen. I like it because it’s waterproof and the lines are very black.





