Finish This Book: Attention Skills

This page has delayed my Finish This Book blog posts by so many months. I actually started work on it way back in August last year, then it sort of sat unfinished until just this week. In fact, it wasn't unfinished, it wasn't even properly started.

The directions for this page instruct you to 'develop you attention skills'. You're told to walk around your neighbourhood, looking at the ground:

Take notes on how many different colors, shapes, and objects you see.

There's then some space to write at the bottom of the page and on the facing page are twenty boxes for you to draw in the things that you saw.

I'll admit, I cheated on this one slightly. It was never going to be practical taking a book the size of this one out for a walk, so I took my shiny new camera instead and took a whole bunch of photos of the things that I saw on the ground. Then they sat on my computer waiting for me to draw them into the book.

So I got to work copying them into my Finish This Book. I'm not the world's greatest artist, but hopefully they're recognisable:

I laid out the pictures in the collage above so you could see what I was drawing. Some of them are quite recognisable in my drawn version.

It's not often that I find an excuse to draw things but I quite enjoyed copying these photos into my book. There's obviously more space for more pictures but I just copied in the sixteen because they were the best things that I found. I had lots of random photos of leaves so once I'd drawn a couple of the interesting ones I didn't see the point of adding in more.

The other bit the book asked me to do was to make some notes on what I'd seen. I made notes when we went for the walk back in August, so it made it easy to add those to the page:

It was an autumn day so there were a lot of reds, oranges & yellows. As it was early autumn there were still quite a lot of green plants as well. There were odd bits of rubbish, half hidden in soil or grass; these stood out because of their colours (blue or red). I was interested to see the floss stick since it seemed really out of place in the countryside, more than the bits of rubbish from food or packaging.

I can't believe that I put off working on this page for so long, but I'm glad I've got it out the way. I'm now free to carry on with the rest of the book and I've nearly reached the end of my 'Secret Intelligence Training'. I can't wait to see what comes next!