Sketching Airplanes at March Air Reserve Base

I visited March Air Reserve Base in Riverside, California with other artists, thanks to special arrangements by United States Air Force Art Collection and Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles. People at the base were preparing for an air show scheduled for the following weekend, and our group was able to observe military firefighters training, see interesting planes, and fly inside C-17 transport carrier.

All the sketches were done on location and watercolored at home from memory and photo references. I’m really glad I sketched as much as I could because it was simply impossible for my little camera to photograph long wingspans of large aircraft or awesome sight of supersonic Thunderbird jets flying in formation (well, I don’t have a sketch of them either – they were too fast!) Below are some of the planes I managed to sketch out of many that I saw – Tomcat is from the base and another set below are from nearby March Air Field Museum:

A longer story of my field trip and more sketches are on my blog post here.