Over the years I have learnt to be careful in my selection of bedtime reading. I know I must avoid anything too stimulating or my brain will gradually warm up and sleep become impossible.

Something similar happens when I’ve been drawing just prior to closing my eyes for the night. As soon as the world goes dark, it lights up again with beautiful three dimensional drawings of whatever I’ve been sketching. Much to my chagrin these are many times better than I can actually draw.

Perhaps it is that annoyance that stops me from sleeping. You would think that the vividness of the images would be so much like a dream that I’d get to sleep all the more quick-sharp. However, I suspect the similarity to dreaming could actually be tricking my brain into thinking that I’m already asleep; hence it doesn’t bother to initiate the actual sleep sequence.

Whatever theory proves correct, the images are beautiful enough (again far beyond my actual capabilities) that this is a kind of insomnia I can live with.

Except tonight I’m worried.

Because I have been spending the evening drawing skulls. And I’m worried about what this might inspire when I close my eyes.

I can only pray that I’ll be lucky and get a band of friendly pirates.

It’s late again.

It’s the pictures, you see.

I’ve been working hard on developing the habit of drawing everyday, and now I can’t stop. The more my pencil flows the more time seems to flow with it and before I know what is going on it is late into the wee hours of the morning.

My sketchbook needs more pictures. It commands me to create them.

The trouble is: drawing doesn’t inspire writing. I need to read books in the evening to inspire blog wisdom. Unfortunately, anatomy books for the artist just don’t cut it. And so you get this kind of thing.

Blogging everyday hard.

For a while I’ve been trying to spend all my free evenings at my drawing desk, trying to improve my draftsmanship. Like most people who love drawing but are not doing it professionally or studying art full time, I have found the habit of drawing everyday to be a difficult one to foster.

But recently I seem to have managed to do just that. It is now what I automatically do after I have my dinner instead of surfing randomly online, watching TV, or washing the dishes.

Even though my primary objective is to enjoy the process of learning and ultimately use it to relax, I’m the kind of guy that gets most satisfaction out of taking things quite seriously. So when I’m drawing, I’m working hard on my weaknesses. Right now, I’m spending most my time studying human anatomy.

Professionally, I make websites and my primary interest is in the user interface. At one end of the scale, this is quite a formal – almost scientific – pursuit. But at the other end it is about making things look nice. So add design to my interest in drawing.

What I wanted to do with Finding Form was split my professional interest in user-interface design into two categories – usability and aesthetics – and study aesthetics separately. The ultimate dream is to create beautiful computer interfaces that are extremely usable, but Finding Form has a tighter goal. Although I believe you always interact with an image in some way, and although I believe most images contain some kind of meaning, the focus here is on the aesthetics of the image. What makes imagery appeal to the senses?

As much as possible then, I want to stick to talking about subjects such as light, contrast, line, colour, balance, texture, shape and how these are used to create something that is beautiful or emotionally captivating in some way.

I would like mentions of creating websites to be seldom. As I focus in on the Finding Form project, the plan is to keep it as some kind of cross between design and fine art. However, if you are interested in my wider goal Jason Santa Maria’s presentation on web design demonstrates a similar goal to mine (see below).

A website for Finding Form will follow, but for now I am starting with a Twitter account.

Here is that video…

SVA Dot Dot Dot Lectures: Jason Santa Maria from MFA Interaction Design on Vimeo.

I was recently fiddling around with Inkscape when I discovered the feature for converting raster images into vectors. For fun I tried it on a random drawing I had scanned into my computer. The result is below:

I was really surprised by the result. I know it’s not the most amazing of images, but it’s the first pencil drawing that I’ve managed to successfully import onto the computer so I thought I’d put it on my blog.

When I find time to get on the scanner, I’ll try importing some more successful drawings.