Workshop on Scientific Illustration

"We would hear our inner voice saying No, you are not meant for this everytime we try to do different things, learning to draw a picture for example", the speaker at the workshop organized by College of Natural Sciences in collaboration with Sigma Xi, CSU chapter, said.

True! I always wanted to try my hand at drawing. Not that I feel I'm an innate artist, I just want to know what I am capable of by putting it to a test.

"Expressing your ideas through art is a good practise. It helps communicating your ideas clearer and faster", he continued. For about 45 minutes, the speaker talked about various techniques to overcome the inner voice and master the art of drawing.

Like all creative works, drawing uses right part of our brain. When we start to draw an image, the left part immediately takes over and command us saying "this line does not look straight, it doesn't look like what-you-see at all, etc". The simplest way to overcome this voice is to try drawing illusions.

Draw a rough sketch of a human profile from a side angle. Now try drawing a mirror image of the profile and observe your thinking process. 

When I did this, I drew a replica of the profile instead of a mirror image! "This is the beginning. By practise, you will be able to overcome this and can draw mirror images at ease", the speaker explained.

Drawing mirror images triggers more response from right part of our brain, and after some time, we would feel the flow by losing track of time while drawing.

In the next stage, one should try to look at light and shadow and identify the shades. Viewing a particular scene through a rectangular frame would also make our life easier by telling us what to draw. One typical advantage in using  a frame is that we can draw a picture by looking at the negative space around the object within the frame.

Towards the end, the speaker showed various examples from Biology and Chemistry of how drawing helped scientists shape their ideas and communicate effectively. The most significant of those examples is a 3000 year old book on Tibetan medicine.

my drawing of a dry fern

Finally, the audience were asked to draw pictures of some of the objects we saw around. I tried my hand at drawing a dry fern, a flower vase with rose and a vow to draw many more in future.

If you don't like the weather, wait for ten minutes!

Only a couple of days ago I was telling my wife that the last snow of this winter had just ended. With the beginning of spring, we were hoping to enjoy some rain. All the Kollywood and Bollywood songs that were shot in rain came to our minds then.

When today's weather changed from sunny to overcast, it was a pleasant surprise for us to see tiny flakes floating all around. With time, those cute little flakes grew in size and became soft pellets. 

"Its snowing again!", we were jumping in a mixture of joy and surprise.

That's when I remembered an old sayings which I read somewhere, "If you don't like the weather, wait for ten minutes".

Nature adores Math!

Found this near a footpath

A post a day ends today!

At the beginning of the year 2012, I accepted a challenge in Goodreads to read 50 books before the end of the year. Somewhere around mid 2012 I realised that 50 books was out of my reach. I revised my target to 20 and I have read 15 books so far. Will I be able to complete the challenge? I guess not.

At the end of November 2012 I posed another challenge to myself. To write a post a day until this year end. I had published only 18 articles in the past eleven months! "Will I be able to complete this new challenge?", I asked myself. 

I certainly do not want to enter into 2013 with two failures! I took the challenge seriously and I vowed to write. I so wanted to welcome 2013 with a success. Of course, I would not forgive myself if I failed twice!

I had plenty of things in my mind to write about. I started off with a travel article, one of the easiest ways to get rid of writers block. The travel article was first in Fort Collins Diary. I then went on to write 11 more articles covering my experiences of the new place where my wife and myself had come to.

Five strangers at a bus stop happened two summers ago when I came to Fort Collins for the first time as a summer intern. That was when I played ping pong with an international student from Pakistan. It was during the same time I met André at one of the Friday Afternoon Club meetings.

After I came to Fort Collins in October 2012 taking a dreadful risk, I revisited the Fort Collins public library and had a few strange acquaintances. I applied for learner's permit and had quite an experience.

Following my success in overcoming my writers block, I wrote a few short stories. Taken was based on the effect of watching too many movies in short span. 

I wrote the draft version of Fish and the Bait a year ago! I revisited the unfinished draft when I felt I had nothing to write. Same is true with Orphaned, the only difference is I did not have a draft version ready this time.  

The story of Kurma Avatar and When the time stood still are two stories that gave me goosebumps after I wrote them. It was also my first attempt to demystify mythological stories and present it from a rational perspective.

Every Saturday, wife and myself would take a Transfort ride either to Carmike or AMC and watch a movie. Life of Pi was the first movie we saw in December. It was followed by Taken 2 and The Hobbit. The only movie that we did not plan earlier was Monsters Inc, which we went on a movie day out with my friend André.

To catch up with reading, we decided to have a study hour between 9.00 and 10.00 PM everyday. We read books that we borrowed from the public library. Though I would not be able to complete the Goodreads challenge, I read two books in December. The sins of the father was written by one of my favourite authors, Jeffrey Archer. The other book that I read in this month was Moonlight becomes you, which was also my first book written by Mary Higgins Clark.

It has been quite an eventful month for me. To be honest, there were times in the past 31 days when I felt I do not want to write anything. But then, there were also times when I felt writing more than one post a day! Looking back, I feel happy about myself that I was able to overcome the urges and stick to my commitment. I was able to write one post a day until the year end! I now have a success story with which I enter into 2013.

I wish you all a very happy and prosperous New Year 2013.

A special thanks to my wife Jaisri and my friends who had read and passed on their comments on my articles. Your support and encouragement made me succeed!

Moonlight Becomes You

No one can predict what will happen the next moment. Nature's way is to surprise us by not revealing us about the future. Our efforts in understanding nature and its ways had made us look into the past and recognize patterns that we believe contains the clue to what lies in ahead of us.

Often times, we chance upon those clues and call them as coincidences. But is it possible to counter a serious of coincidences in any one's life? A look into human history tells us that whenever such a serious of coincidences happen, there is always a human's hand in the course.

We always suspect that something is wrong when a few people who are close to each other die one after another, that too, peacefully at night when they all fall asleep.

We have experienced such events happen in our life. But how often do we begin to suspect and try to look at it from a rational perspective? 

How often do we have a quest to look into the pattern and try to connect the dots? How often do we isolate natural events from the events which are triggered by humans by virtue of their emotions; jealousy, ego, anger, frustration or whatever?

In Moonlight Becomes You, Mary Higgins Clark, through the eyes of Maggie (the protagonist), teaches us to identify patterns, isolate human element and trace the real culprit. If you are smart, you can find the culprit much before the climax.

A good writer is the one who introduces more than one pattern interlaced with another thereby confusing the reader. This is the best strategy that would result in having more than one suspect, which helps in building the suspense element in a novel. After reading Moonlight Becomes You (my first book of Mary Higgins Clark), I have no doubt that she is a good writer.