I noticed that I often get inspired by a piece of music, a book or a movie so much that I feel the urge to draw a portrait of the author whose wonderful work made my heart beat faster with admiration of his/her talent. I’ve been thinking about creating a series of portraits of people who inspire me with their creative work. I believe this portrait series could be quite interesting as it would certainly include some faces you never expected to see in this blog. Faces like this of Michael Connelly.

Michael Connelly impressed me with his books and particularly with the series of novels featuring Mickey Haller – a defense attorney whose flexible mind and interesting personality made me want to know more about what it is to be a lawyer in the USA. Before I tried to read Connelly’s first legal novel featuring Mickey Haller (“The Lincoln Lawyer”), I thought lawyer’s life was too boring. However the author managed to create a fascinating story with mind battles in courts which proved to be rather interesting even for a person having nothing to do with all that legal stuff. By the way, “The Lincoln Lawyer” was adapted for film in 2011. I have not watched the movie yet but my personal belief that any film is unlikely to be better than the book it is based on.

So being inspired by Michael Connelly and his defense attorney character Mickey Haller, I created this author’s portrait.

The majority of online shops selling almost any kind of equipment use photographs to showcase their products. Nobody can do without photos when selling sophisticated devices. However there are businesses wishing to display their products in an out-of-the-box way. Therefore I was asked to create a number of technical illustrations for Radius Security Solutions – a company designing, manufacturing and integrating high performance industrial grade IP video and audio surveillance systems (the company is about to be re-branded into Radius Vision). Being an engineer by profession, creating technical illustrations and drawings is something I really enjoy. I especially enjoyed this assignment because I was asked not to simply create some simple looking drawings but use my signature cross-hatching drawing technique to create more or less cool-looking illustrations of security cameras, antennas and assembled video surveillance systems.

I believe that the reason for commissioning me to create technical illustrations of all those cameras and antennas stuff was not only company’s willingness to represent the products using an offbeat approach but also their need to demonstrate how completely assembled surveillance systems would look like. Creating professional photos for fully assembled security systems would be quite a difficult task to do since such systems comprehend 5-6 units mounted on a pole. So if you photograph a fully mounted surveillance system on a single picture some components will likely look pretty small and indistinct. Drawings, however, allow a better flexibility in representing sophisticated equipment and give a possibility to “play” with proportions, light and shadow in such a way that they let viewers see more clearly all the important details and structures.