I’ve been invited to participate in a very special event on September 17, The Big Cat Quick Draw, which will be held at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, California from 2-5pm. I’ll be one of nine artists painting and drawing from a live cheetah, Tango, from Sierra Big Cat Haven. We’ll have between 60 and 90 minutes to create our piece of original art.

Once we’re done, our work will be auctioned off to raise money for Project Survival’s Cheetah Education Center at the Soysambu Conservancy in Kenya.

If you’re in the area, you’re invited! More information here.

To get ready for this event, I needed to brush up on cheetahs and decide what media I think I will want to use. So I got out my pencils, watercolors and some different art papers yesterday and did some quick studies. My reference was photos I took of cheetahs in the Masai Mara, Kenya, in October 2004, when I was one of ten artists who went on a 16 day art workshop/safari with internationally known wildlife life artist, the late Simon Combes, the father of Guy Combes, who is one of the organizers of the quick draw.