TAM2012 sketchbook edition

I attended TAM2012 last weekend, and as I do, I brought along a sketchbook. These are all pages that I drew during the four days I was at the conference. 

Big bird here was something that I sketched out while hanging around the hallway where exhibition booths were. I was thinking of a therizinosaur when drawing, although it's by no means accurate, and unfortuately I totally told a whole group of people the wrong way to pronounce that name, and they took my word for it. I DID qualify that I was probably wrong, but it didn't matter. 

The rest of these were done during the various talks/lectures/panels. This is obviously what you draw during a skeptics convention. 

Sloths were requested, sloths were drawn. Also, I need to get a smart phone so that I don't have to demand that my friend look up sloth noses for me because I can't remember what they look like (answer: weird).

The tiny drawing of a map is the one example of actual notes that I took about what I was listening to while drawing all this. I thought the phrase "a map doesn't equal the land" was a nice way of summing up the same concept that  The Treachery of Images does. I'd like to say there's some sort of relation to the velociraptor and giraffe in disguise, but, no, I think I started out riffing on the speaker that talking about how we form our concept of self. And, er, fairly certain that at no point did the speaker say a thing about velociraptors. 

The person towards the bottom was one of the more vehement speakers. 

The bear comes directly from one of the lectures, where the speaker was using the different forms teddy bears have taken over the years as an example of what qualities we find cute, and how humanoid cartoons/toys/etc tend to become "cuter" over time. This is not an example of that. The sketch in the upper right is a study of part of the curtains above the stage.

There were a few different speakers that brought up optical illusions as examples of ways your brain tries and fails to perceive images correctly. This stuff is interesting to me, except that the topic always seems to be presented by someone who has never taken a drawing class, and has never realized that if you're attempting to draw with any sort of realism, you're creating an optical illusion. I mean, that's why linear and atmospheric perspective works, and if it's done right you don't even notice, whereas the standard optical illusions scream out that there's something wacky going on here.

This image is Bring Your Own Symbolism. Seriously, it started as a doodle that just got out of hand. Points to anyone who can guess what the scribbles at the bottom towards the left are supposed to represent (hint: a physicist was talking)

And lastly, a more serious dino-rider. For a given value of serious, at least.