I returned home on Monday from attending the Explorers Club Lowell Thomas Annual Dinner in Santa Barbara, California. I spent a productive afternoon the day before the Saturday event sketching at the Santa Barbara Zoo, keeping it really simple: a 7×5″ Pentalic Nature Sketchbook and a Sakura Micron .01 black pen.

Sketching live animals can be quite challenging and is great exercise for one’s visual memory. None of these took more than about five minutes. Sometimes I only did the contour and filled in the bodies a bit later, like with the condors above. I did take photos but learned long ago that drawing animals is a very different experience than shooting photos in that you have to really LOOK and SEE to get anything down. In the end it’s as much about process as result, but I’m pretty happy with these.