Well I spent part of today doing something I really shouldn’t have: experimenting in Photoshop. If you want to kill hours and hours of time, tweaking images in Photoshop is a sure way to lose an afternoon.
A couple weeks ago, I figured out how to turn graphics into interesting shapes in Photoshop (tip: the "paste into" command is part of it). I’m doing a booklet cover for a local non-profit organization. Since this is one of those pro-bono things, I can goof around (read: no billable time on this thing).
So I had a wild and crazy idea of making my booklet cover include shapes from a quilt pattern. A couple months ago, I got a huge book of quilt patterns from the bargain bin at Borders books. I looked through the tome for a quilt block that wasn’t too complex. (For those of you quilters who might care, the pattern I chose is called "Card Tricks.")
Anyway, going through three CDs of photos, bringing them into Photoshop, and then endlessly futzing around with layers and selection tools took ages. Of course, I also had to spend quite a bit of quality time in the Photoshop online help and deleting the inevitable goof ups. After I finally got everything to work, I then had to mess with the images again within the cover art, which I created in Corel Draw.
Meanwhile, all this quiet industry on my part meant big, big nap time for the canines snoring on my office floor. Before I knew it, darkness fell and they didn’t get their run through the forest. Oops. So I figured out a cool new technique, but I’m going to be blessed with ultra-squirrelly woofers this evening.
Oh well, sometimes everyone must suffer for art 😉