Of Chaos and Creativity

"Tidy up time! Tidy up time!"

Barney

Well, since we're sharing...

My friends Debi and Frances have coincidentally on purpose posted some musings on this shared bane of our existence - housecleaning. I, like Debi, used to be quite neat and good at cleaning. Unlike her, however, my organizing skills are now mostly theoretical. Having 2 small, boisterous children in my advanced middle age is quite challenging - and I can't even claim to have another "real" job outside my home.

Excuses, excuses. Since my tiny ventures into the art/web world all stem from my precious laptop, I should really be much more in control of my environment. Should, could, would. Can't. Or don't wanna. Haven't figured that one out yet.

I do, however, generally end up with some method to my messy madness - especially around my desk area. I'm always making endless lists of chores, projects, whish-lists really and find them overwhelming and impossible to even check off in the end. So I've come up with this little trick: I write one item at a time on a small scrap of cardboard (coloured, of course), and stick them all in no particular order on my corkboard. For some reason, things seem to get done/ purchased/eliminated much faster this way.

One last tip: I found these useful corkboards in a package of 4, probably at Wal-Mart, and covered two of them in a cloth contact paper. Red-cork-red-cork. Yes, this is the lame reference to creativity in the title.

Little Butterfly Deconstructed

Now that I've broken this little dry spell, and thanks to Debi's kind comment (as always), I thought I might as well use the latest post to talk about using Photoshop for altering images.

I started out with this adorable snapshot of my little ballerina at her recital about 4 weeks ago, and used it to play around in Photoshop. I liked what I came up with enough to post it here.

(Before)

I started by using the blur tool in the background, but used a shaped brush - I'm not sure how much of an impact this had, but I feel it did soften the edges.

I then decided to turn it into a grayscale image to see how the special effects filters would come out. I settled on rough pastels with a bit of texture.

I then used the magic wand tool to highlight part of the image and used the paint bucket/gradient tools to fill in various parts with varying degrees of opacity and different colours.

(After)

It's really fun to take a picture like that, and alter it with this really magical program. It's a tool that's really as good as your own imagination. Although I do have to admit, sometimes it is also hugely frustrating - but as the old (French) saying goes: "There are no bad tools, only bad workers".

Even if I end up chucking hours of work to my laptop's recycle bin in utter disgust, I'm still drawn to playing around with some image on this really cool tool almost every day. It's like doodling, only better.

Little Butterfly

So, no... I haven't been swallowed by some crater. Or abducted by aliens. Not exactly. Is there such a thing as Rebound Post-traumatic Stress Syndrome? Maybe I'll just invent that one. Talk about creative paralysis - I hope this will be over soon.

But that's neither here nor there. Here's my little photoshoped ballerina butterfly, by way of saying hi to sis's latest post from a parallel universe.

Oh

(op art girl © R. Koleilat - 2007)

"she looked for trouble as if it were money and she needed some..."

not by me