At first glance it appears to be a small coyote.
Look closer, and it seems almost like a cross between a coyote and a bobcat, oddly feline in its face and movements.
Then you see the tail, long and luxuriously full, and you know it can only be a fox.
The Gray Fox is the only North American canid that can climb trees! They even like to live in trees for safety.
He makes a handsome addition to my menagerie.
I went a little more stylized and art-deco-y this time.
I love egrets. I love their elegant grace and their luminous whiteness.
They populate the ponds and waterways of Texas like bright visitors from some exotic land, and I love them.
An egret lives alone at the water reclamation pond where I work. It’s like his own private oasis. I thought of him while I was drawing this week’s sketch.
These little guys are all over Texas.
Fun fact: Desert cottontails hardly ever drink water. I feel like I should make a craft beer joke here, because Texas, but desert cottontails really just get all the moisture they need from the plants they eat.
My Texas Wildlife menagerie is growing!
My sketch is a day late this week, and I still didn’t manage to finish it.
The humble but vocal cicada. Its metallic buzz is the sound of a hot summer day in Texas.
This sketch is a clear failure to simplify. Apparently the more familiar I am with my subject matter, the easier it is for me to depict it with a few simple lines. If I’m drawing something I’m not super familiar with, like armadillos or cicadas, I end up with a tall pile of reference photos and a thousand unnecessary details. And in this case, an unfinished sketch. I’ll try to do better next week.
Austin is home to the world’s largest urban bat colony.
About a million and a half Mexican free-tailed bats reside under the Congress Avenue Bridge. They emerge at dusk to hunt mosquitoes and other insects, and return at dawn.
Fun fact: Bats and armadillos are both nocturnal. But armadillos sometimes venture out in daylight, especially in cool weather.
