It was 2011, and I was at the Stotesbury Cup Regatta. I was the coxswain of a four man boat. This regatta is the biggest one of the season. I was chosen to led this boat, because I was the best! Wait Chris how can you say you were the best, are you just being arrogant? Probably, but I was pretty much the best of the worst. It was my first year on the crew team, and all the other coxswains were really timid, so I stepped up to the plate, and hit a home run. I really enjoyed crew, I think I had an aptitude for it since I had been sailing many times before with my parents. So the water didn’t scare me. The only thing that prevented me from pursuing crew in college was the time commitment! I wanted to focus on my studies, however without that constraint I would still be yelling on the rivers today. Anyway back to the story….

Stotes (that’s what the cool people call it anyway) is the largest high school Regatta in the nation (to my knowledge). So to be able to qualify for the actually races, one must get into the top bracket in the time trials. My boat was in its time trial, and we were flying down the river! It seemed like we were going to probably qualify, I mean we were doing awesome! And then all of a sudden there was a duck in the way! It wasn’t moving, normally ducks just fly away when they see the boat coming, but this was just a really dumb duck I guess..  A little tiny piece of me wanted to keep going at the duck, and hopefully it would just fly away when we got close, however its back was turned.. What if it was a deaf duck or something? What if we hit it. If a big bird like that hits someones oar there is a good chance it could break a rowers rib.. So I had to deviate my course a little bit… After that the race was over and did terrible haha I think we placed 40th out of like 70.. There is a picture of us after the race and we could tell we didn’t do well. This is what I think of when I think of that moment:

You can really see the emotion..

Now that the story is done, you might have one question, why did you say the sky was red in the title? Well I lied to make the story seem cooler, sorry…

As for the process of creating this masterpiece for this daily create. I didn’t have the picture with me (Its a home) so I tried to remember it best as possible. I used a fountain pen with a broad nib, and this ink. It’s one of my favorites! The actually sketching didn’t take too long. I have little to no talent with regards to sketching, so I tried to own that in my image. I just tried to capture the scene without worrying to much about each of the forms. From a design perspective I don’t think this was necessarily a bad thing either. I may not have the most ascetically pleasing forms, but I think my idea was perfectly conveyed, and its not really that hard on the eyes. I think it kind of forms its own type of style. I then took a picture of my sketch and saved it to dropbox, from there I uploaded it to flickr!