It has been a while since I did anything artistic, so I have been feeling like getting back to it the past few days. I finally did so today and spent about an hour drawing an eagle with charcoal. I used a random reference from a Google Images search, but I viewed it on my phone only, so I would just get the overall shapes from it. Of course, you can only do so much detail with charcoal anyway.

I also took snapshot of my progress every few minutes, using my Nexus One phone. Here are some scaled down versions for quick comparison:

For a few minutes every day, I find myself distracted by the incredibly bad parallel parking I see in Seattle. The image is an example of someone with no spacial awareness, the available space roughly the same size as the car. That didn’t prevent him (or her) from attempting to park and then proceeding to hit both the vehicle in front and behind. He then pulled out a bit to correct the angle and did it again. The owner of the car behind came out and banged on the rear quarter panel of the parking vehicle to let the driver know he was about to hit the car again.

The driver drove off shortly after that, but another car came within thirty seconds to try at the same spot. Fortunately, this car was 3/4 the size of the previous vehicle. Unfortunately, the driver still managed to hit both the vehicle in front and the vehicle behind. If only such hits were a rare occurrence and not a daily one.

At least I have gained new respect for the durability of car paint.

This is the final sketch I did on the 27th (Friday). It’s also in charcoal and based on an anatomical sketch from one of my art reference books. Her face is terrible, but the rest is okay. She looks slightly wider than she should be, so her ribs look a bit off.

I also did this sketch on the 27th (Friday) with charcoal. It’s not perfect, especially her head, but it came out pretty well, and I’m definitely still in love with charcoal. This is based on an example anatomical sketch from one of my reference books.

Finally, I am catching up my posts with my sketch book. I did this one on the 27th (Friday). I love charcoal, but I commonly try to put in too much detail or sketch a large subject on a small paper. This time I took the opposite approach and sketched a small object on a 9″x12″ (22.9×30.5cm) paper, and it turned out pretty well.

This is supposed to be Snake from the Metal Gear series, but it looks a lot like I carved him out of melting wax and then sketched the result. I did this one October 4th with charcoal.

I actually did this charcoal sketch directly after the previous pencil sketch because I disliked the other so much, haha. This one is very simplistic but shows a decent amount of form for being such a quick sketch.

More than a month ago, I finished The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton. It is a book about a violent man who undergoes a medical procedure to cure his seizures and eliminate his violent tendencies by implanting electrodes directly into his brain. It was originally published in 1972, so I was especially interested in the technological differences that 35+ years make.

Technology around the various medical fields is always interesting to me, but neurotechnology is absolutely fascinating. There is a bit of talk about the technology in this book, but it’s not particularly heavy, so you don’t have to worry about it getting in the way if you aren’t interested. There is a fair bit of medical terminology in the book though, and there were times when I felt like Crichton was showing off the vast amount of research he did for this book. As if he discovered some interesting nugget of information and couldn’t stand to not have it in the book.

The Terminal Man is a good book, but it’s not exceptionally great. Some of the philosophical questions that it raises were probably very relevant at the time it was originally published, but “brain pacemakers” aren’t quite as cutting-edge as they were, and people have come to accept and rely heavily on technology in their daily lives. Bottom line: If you’re interested in psychology, neurotechnology, or Crichton’s other books, you’ll probably like it.

It looks like I am behind on posting the random sketches in my sketch book, so I’ll try to catch up (this one is from October 3rd!). This is a simple/quick sketch of an arm and back of a male subject, using a soft pencil (maybe 6B?). Yeah, it’s definitely rough and not really worth posting other than because of my decision to post every page of my sketch book. I’ll queue up some posts for the next few days to try to catch up though, and those sketches are much better than this one.

I’ve been meaning to post this picture for a while, but I just finally got around to it today. A letter for Stuart in Florida somehow ended up in my mailbox (I’m Ian, and I live in Washington State). Our names and addresses are completely different, so I have no idea how it happened. I think Obama was right when he said, “It’s the post office that’s always having problems.”