Blog reader and Art-by-Committee contributor Damien Johnston sent some cool links showing how model builders have used corks for architectural maquettes. Whether plain or painted, they can simulate the rough texture of stone.
In an atrium of the Mission Inn, there's a fountain.
I sat there and sketched it, and here's one of the creatures that waddled up for a sip early one morning when no one was looking.
Then a saucer descended and dropped off this guy, who was old and twice as huge before he took a sip. 
For a pose as unusual as this, I knew I had to build a maquette to understand the three dimensional spiraling and overlapping of the form. Where should that tucked leg go? And what should happen with the tail? At this angle, you can't see the tucked leg, but it's there. 
As I built and painted the maquette, I checked a lot of reference photos from my physical and digital scrap files. I came up with dozens of pictures of birds (aquatic birds, songbirds, and many others) in this classic pose. Photos of actual backlit birds helped with edge lighting and color corona.
Here's the final oil painting, which appears in the current issue of Ranger Rick magazine.
The fossil of the small flightless dinosaur Mei long shows the tail wrapped around the body, with the head tucked back under the front arm. The name Mei long means "dragon, soundly sleeping." 
Mick Ellison did this reconstruction of the sleeping pose. When Ranger Rick asked me to paint Mei long for the new October issue (which should be on the stands now), I didn't want to copy my friend Mick's beautiful visualization.
I tried to find out all I could about how contemporary birds sleep. Mike Della Chiesa, who runs a bird breeding center in Saugerties, New York, told me that almost all songbirds and parrots sleep standing on one foot. If they don't, it can be a sign that they're not healthy or happy. 
So I did this sketch to show the art director. Tomorrow I'll show you how I went from this to the final oil painting.
But right now I just want to show you a few pages of my Explorer's Journal.
I've been traveling all over the Mission Inn in Riverside, California to document some of the strange creatures who live here. 
If you wake up early, the rooftop dragons are still perched on the towers because they love the sound of bells.
I was awake at these wee hours because the Gronkus was pounding away on the old piano.
I'm doing 50 of these little drawings, all on location. There will be one to give each of the collectors who are attending.
Better get back to work. The fandango told me to check out Gladys, the one-eyed fortune teller in the sitting room of Floor 3.
One row of tiles seems to converge to the right. The row just above or below it seems to converge to the left. The effect seems strongest away from the center of vision.
When the graphic is shown in its pure form, you can sense the lines separating or constricting in your peripheral vision as you scan each row from the right to the left.
This building in the Melbourne docklands was designed to take advantage of the illusion. It takes force of thought to convince yourself that the floors are really level.This illusion demonstrates the effect of some simple image processing occurring at the retina combined with some complex processing in the cortical cells of the striate cortex. The incoming image is first filtered by the centre-surround operator of the retina. The apparent tilt of the mortar lines is caused by orientation-sensitive simple cells in the striate cortex. The cells interact with one another to interpret the diagonal bands produced by the retina as a single continuous line, tilted in the direction of the diagonal bands.
