First, some fútbol doodles – sports photos provide a good reference for interesting poses. Trying to get a feel for the motion in a scene without worrying too much about details.

Second, portraits! Just let the lines spill out and see what happens. You might like it.

My Twitter bot @WheresThatSat is up and running. More information about what it does is available at WheresThatSat.com. In short, it replies to comments about satellites with maps and information about the satellite’s recent course.

This week I’ve been making a complementary web site that displays more information (altitude, speed, heading, etc.) along with a Google Map rendition of the satellite’s recent path. The bot will include a map link with each response. The site isn’t finished yet (some icons and styles are still placeholders), but here’s sneak peak:

My goal is to get things working smoothly enough to let WheresThatSat resume running later this week, at least on a trial basis. Although the bot could search for and reply to any mention of the many satellites it knows about, I’ve decided it will only post unsolicited responses to a sample of tweets about one or two “in the news” satellites (queries explicitly addressed to @WheresThatSat will, of course, have access to a full catalog of satellites). This is partly a matter of manners and partly a matter of avoiding excessive API calls (Twitter imposes rate limits on how frequently programs can interact with it).

I like this video orientation better, but I realize it’d probably be better if the camera wasn’t quite so close to the page. Frames are five seconds apart, so the whole thing took four or five minutes.

Anyway, here’s a scan of the sketch:

Here’s Herschel Walker, from this Air Force photo:

Here are a few more drawings from earlier this week.

This one was also done left-handed:

Wading in the shallow end of the color pool:

Last but not least, a quick one from a gritty corner of the page. There seems to be little relationship between how long I spend on a drawing and how happy I am with how it looks.

Inspired by the milk frother drawbot recently featured at The Kid Should See This.