After months of crafting and photographing, I was reminded today that drawing is my favorite art form. It's the one I have most experience in too, which means I'm not wasting brain power fumbling with technique - I can focus entirely on the drawing itself, and the pencil is a mere extension of my hand. Vision in head goes right to paper.

Actually, 2H pencil, or H pencil, or at softest HB pencil is a mere extension of my hand. This was a 2B pencil (I was working on site at the aquarium, and had limited pencil selection), thus I had a tiny bit of issue with technique. But soft graphite has it's place and it worked well in filling in the dark areas of these octopus sketches.

The Birch Aquarium Hall of Fishes will undergo an extensive revamping of information panels. Currently, all critter ID info is on a panoramic light box display above the tanks. Next year, instead there will be touch screen interactive computers at table-ish level to provide fish ID information and much more. So what to do with all the light boxes, hovering above the tanks? An idea was floated: to replace the text and fish photos with a large artistic graphic, photographic or not, to subtly enhance the appreciation of the animals on show within the tank.

The Giant Pacific Octopus tank will be the first to receive a trial run of both the touch screen computer and light box graphic, because Octopuses are just cool like that, to aquarium and non-aquarium folk alike. Thus I was asked to come up with some possible compositions for that light box. Here they are. The comic-like composition as a whole was unintentional, at least on a conscious level. But it occurs to me that these four panels could be read as a sequence.