A New Skill Set to Make Life Interesting.

I love cracking open a new program and getting to know it.  Playing around with the buttons and menus and figuring out how to get the program to do what I want is enormous fun.  It scratches my curiousity bump and taps my creativity in completely different ways from story-telling.

Most people I know can think of nothing worse than being forced to learn how to use a new piece of software.  I guess it’s my geeky side that likes it so much.

I’ve been semi-competent when manipulating images since I got my first computer.  Most of it is self-taught.

However, when I see what graphic artists can do with a few clicks, my creative muscle twitches.  I love colour and the story-suggesting possibilities of images and the idea of making those images say what I want them to say has always appealed to me.

Recently, I dumped all the graphic manipulation programs I have been using for years, and finally caved and subscribed to Adobe Photoshop.

The learning curve is huge, but I carved out a couple of hours to play around with the software.  Over time, I’ll expand my repetoire, but my early attempts were encouraging.

My daughter-in-law is an artist.  (I have so much trouble saying ‘daughter-in-law’ — I’m in denial that I’m old enough to have one!)  Robyn has had her work displayed internationally as well as selling locally.

While I was playing around with Photoshop, I grabbed a couple of photos of her work from her Facebook page.

Here’s the first one:

This is Baz, Robyn’s dog.

First I cleaned it up, and squared it up:

Then I played:

Robyn is an equestrian, too:

So, pics of horses are her specialty!

I messed with her painting (she forgave me afterwards):

How do you stretch your creative muscle in unexpected directions?

Tracy Cooper-Posey
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