How can we approach this problem? Explosions!

I am immensely happy today.

I think this is down to A LOT of things, including bright, pale, shockingly cold weather, Krissa, a night of drawing, productive workdays, Krissa, free bagels, De-Phazz's 'The Mambo Craze', Krissa, getting over another cold, soup, Stereolab, talking about steam-exploding baby carrots with Shiv, Radio 4 podcasts, coffee, Krissa, Simon Winchester's 'Outposts' and 'The Map That Changed The World', discovering Vanadium Flow Batteries, and the fact that it's Friday.

After my 'Engine Room' post I haven't managed to play with music very much yet, but I've spent a bit of time with pen and paper, and as proof, here's a little doodle I did the other day. Click on it for some of the other proto-stuff on flickr. I don't have a scanner, so I took photos of the sketches. That felt odd.

So I used to draw a lot when I was about 11, and checked out all sorts of exciting books from the library that rarely ever found their way back - books with titles like 'How to Draw', 'How to Draw Aeroplanes', 'Learn To Draw', 'Learn to Draw Cartoons' 'Draw SPACECRAFT!' and things like that. Lazy and yet arrogant little squirt that I was I usually ignored all of the advice inside on how to draw by starting with component shapes and construction lines and just tried to copy the finished article, which never quite came out right.
In defence of my logic of the time, if you're going to draw something just right by trying to get the component shapes just right before building things up over the top, you're increasing the amount of stuff you have to get just right and you might as well have a crack at doing the whole thing in one go.
I mean, I could tell if I was drawing a 747 (to pick an example at random) wrong, because it either looked like a 747 or it didn't. I couldn't tell if I had drawn a collection of seemingly random, slightly irregular ellipses wrong until I tried to turn it into a 747, at which point I would have to try the ellipses again.

This is the sort of thing I need to overcome, coming back to all this at the grand old age of 27.

So look upon these doodlettes as evidence of a start in good faith, and let me know what you think! If you draw yourself, feedback and pointers towards literature or online guides would be very much appreciated, ta.

Have a great weekend!