Posts Tagged ‘photoshop’

Quick story first: my parents have a poodle (Bella), who fell in love with a tortoise (Douglas) that friends of theirs had as a pet. So my parents friend gave Douglas to Bella as a pet. (yes, the poodle has a pet tortoise). Anyway, my parents left in their RV last week to go to Arizona for 2 weeks of relaxation, site-seeing and golfing. While Bella could go with them, Douglas couldn’t, so I offered to “tortoise sit”. I learned 2 things about tortoises really quickly: they are scared of absolutely every moment, and they like to hide in stuff.

Onto the point of this post: natural motivation.

I had a bit of a crazy day today, working on a couple client projects. I was tired, a little crabby and I needed a little brain break. So, I wandered outside to see where Douglas had disappeared to. When I found him, he was wandering along our patio. I sat down near him, and for the first time since I got him last week, I really looked at him. When he walks, is head bobs in an interesting fashion …I could almost hear him whistling a little tune and see his smile as he meandered along. His legs and arms (or limbs?) are covered in little spikes, but they aren’t sharp, it is more to pull him along. He kind of drags them, rather than lifting them, because lifting them would be heavy with the shell. Then there was his shell. It is beautiful, smooth, colorful and really unique. After staring at him for what seemed like 20 minutes, I felt really relaxed, my thoughts had slowed and I was smiling. Douglas was my natural motivation today. Just watching him participate in life in his own way was what I needed for that extra boost of energy and refocus to finish out my day.

Just before I came back inside, I snapped a picture of him. Not thinking much of it, I opened the picture in photoshop and played with a few different filters – and was pleasantly surprised when the image above came out.

Where can you find a little natural motivation?

You are only limited by your creativity and your talent. Neither of which have limits if you are willing to learn.

What turns your attention? What catches your eye? Do you give yourself a chance to stop and admire whatever it is?

For me, designer shoes advertisements and incredible photo manipulations are my weakness.

Here are my two favorite of the moment:

Peter Lippmann for Christian Louboutin, Winter 2010

Fishy Island by Eric Johansson

1. Twouble with Twitterers: yeah, ok, so I may be this bad sometimes…

2. Redesigning the Stop sign – if a marketing team was in charge of designing a stop sign…definitely true for some of the large agencies.

3. Font Fight – for the Web Geek in all of us (first shown to me by Creative Whirlwind)

4. Hulu and Dennis Leary – bliggity blogs, facey spacey’s, tweety pages…yeah, I couldn’t help but laugh

5. Your printer is a brat – for all of us who have dealt with the evilness of a printer…

8 hours of Photoshop, graphic design and images = difficulty getting my mind focused on writing.

The designs that I created today were great (if i do say so myself…) but I was having a lot of trouble pulling myself a way to write. And even when I did, the most writing I could do was on twitter (and even there was hit or miss). After using Twitter to discuss the writing melting powers that Photoshop has on me, @beachpig sent a great message that clearly explained what I am suffering from and what I need:

“Rental creativity…when the Wright side of your brain is tapped out.”

Of course, that led to a great question for my readers: Do you find it harder to do a different type of work after you’ve been focused on one type all day? Where do you find your “rental creativity”?

The last few months have been tough for us all (and I don’t even want to think about tomorrow…) but so far, I am surviving. It may be just barely, and it may not be the most fun, but it is still surviving.

Although it isn’t exactly the first of the month, it is the first Monday and therefor the first day of this month that I am thinking about work and how to keep it going for the next few months. One of the best ways for me to start a month off right is by learning something new that I can spend the rest of the month trying to improve. For example, last month was my time to focus on learning to use photoshop better than I already can. This month, I have decided to take a step back and review some of the basic web design tricks. Often we are so focused on moving forward that we forget to go back to basics, but with how crazy everything is around me right now, it feels good to go through and simplify a few things – plus, there are always new tricks I can pick up…because unfortunately, as much as I wish I did – I don’t know everything .

What new tricks can you pick up? Is there a great tutorial site you turn to for help?