Baby's First Portrait

[Later edit] Catalana has pointed out, in the nicest possible way, that I neglected to explain what I was talking about.  This post is about my new canoe design, Binturong, and about actually getting it down on paper.  [End edit]

I made arrangements to use the drafting table at Carson Newman (with a certain amount of wheel-spinning owing to the fact that someone else had a picture taped to it, and of course the students have first call but it turns out he's just *storing* the picture there because it is too big for the shelves and it is okay if I take it off to work on my stuff as long as I am careful with it and put it back when I am done). 

I began work about 10 this morning and faded out at noon owing to having forgotten to eat breakfast and not having brought a lunch.  So I walked home again and came back at three (an art class runs from 1 pm to 3 pm in that room) to work on it some more.  I have done about half the stations at this point.

I am not sure what I think.  There was an odd bulge in the center station which I actually re-drew (after doing some hasty figuring on the calculator and working out that the volume involved would be roughly 35 grams of water or slightly [Later edit] less more than [End edit] one ounce, which presumably shouldn't matter) but then it turned out that bulge would be nearly exactly the same in the station behind the middle station so now I am not sure I did the right thing.  I am discovering that I trust my eye more than I trust the numbers in the table of offsets, which is a little odd.  I don't normally have such gut faith in my estimates-by-eye.  On the other hand I have now drawn out, um,  3 1/2 sets of plans and have used a fourth set that was pre-printed.  Maybe when my eye says "that must be wrong--no, really, that doesn't look right" it knows what it's doing.