Another Sketching Jaunt

Today Numenius and I took a trip to a zoo we hadn’t visited before: the one in Folsom. This was a refreshing change from previous zoos we’d been to; the focus is entirely on providing a safe home for mostly California-native animals that would either not have made it in the wild or would have had to have been destroyed. There are several camp-marauding bears, injured raptors, foxes, wolves, wolf/dog hybrids, tigers rescued from an illegal breeder (who apparently had 60 large cats in an area maybe three of them could have lived in comfortably), bunnies and chickens rescued from overzealous Easter gift-bearing relatives, ferrets, and so on. Peacocks, including an interesting male albino, supervised all day. The reason we went, though, is so I could do some studies of mountain lions.

I wish I had access to an inexhaustible warehouse of high-quality photographs of wildlife I could use whenever I needed an image for a project at work. We have a couple of good shots here and there, but you don’t want to overuse these. Plus, I could never get a photo of what it is I want—a mother looking out, two cubs playing—in the order and so on. I’ll have to do it myself.

My illustration teacher used to tell us to be sure to get a variety of pictorial references before starting a project. Photos should be a last resort. Live was always best, she said; video’s pretty good (funky pause buttons make an animal almost seem to be in motion); taxidermy and skeletons have their uses. But live is certainly best (and most challenging). Although the Folsom Zoo currently has no mountain lion cubs, I was able to see things in these animals I’d never noticed before. Our kittens are structurally similar but there are important differences; the mountain lion, though small for a large cat, is massive and moves heavily (though a couple of pounces showed us how little chance you’d have to get away if one decided you were somehow superfluous).

Above is a group of sketches I reworked when we got home this afternoon, a combination of watercolor pencil and watercolor.