This was an A3 pencil drawing done for a friend and colleague of mine, Rhys Joseph. It didn’t come from a photo he saw, but rather an aircraft that he saw in the early morning driving on the highway to work. The atmosphere was just right that he saw one of Airlink’s Avro RJ85’s doing a go-around, and the vortices trailing off the control surfaces on the wing were curved. Rhys described it to me, and we worked quite closely to piece together the view of O.R. Tambo International Airport from the N12, the aircraft at the correct attitude and the position of the vortices on the wings and their curvature resulting from the go-around.

I made a lot of use of pencil shavings to get the atmosphere and lifted the vortices back out of it with a putty eraser.