Busy Yellow

3/20/19 Maple Leaf neighborhood

3/20/19 gesture sketches

Unlike the excavator I showed you yesterday, which was snoozing on a trailer, this one was working busily. I watched with fascination as its big mouth scooped up dirt from one side, spun around, and opened its jaws to dump the dirt on the other side – over and over. I wasn’t sure how I was going to capture all that activity, so I started by making a few quick gesture sketches of its various positions.

Eventually I noticed that it was pausing for longer periods in one position than the others, so I chose that one to make a final sketch. Whenever it spun around to the other side, I just waited a bit for it to return to the original position. It’s like sketching birds at our feeder; they move quickly, but they always seem to return to the same gesture again.

(While all of this was going on, a team of gardeners decided to work on the parking strip where I was standing and turned on their noisy leaf blowers. I had to pause to put in my ear plugs!)