Plight of the Creative Bone

Heavy sigh, ahhhhh, the plight of the creative bone.....   I don't know why it is that sometimes, certain people just get the urge...I liken it to spring fever and cleaning. Spring comes and you just want to clean stuff out. That is what the creative urge is.....for some it might be learning to knit, then knitting a scarf for everyone you know (even if it is mid August) then putting the needles away never to be used again. For some people it is some sort of class, or purchasing some sort of equipment or being inspired by HGTV (the H standing for Heaven or Hell, depending on whether you are the husband or the wife). For me it can be sitting and playing at my computer for hours.......yes, my husband has informed me, HOURS.

Sometimes you just want to be creative. No particular reason, you just feel the "need." OK, so maybe not ALL people feel that way, some just want to get through whatever task is at hand. Yesterday was a little of the creative day for me......I was going to shoot photos for background for a podcast and was waiting at home for "the call." I was checking out the cameras, (I use a Nikon D50 and a little pocket for candids - Panasonic Lumix), gathering lens, making sure sufficient battery and card space and all that jazz and starting goofing taking pics of myself. Now some might consider this weird, and it is........but I use those to play with and I don't feel bad when I chop my own head off or make it look really weird.....but feel kinda guilty doing it to others, so I like to keep a variety of pics in my "bank". Also I like to change and it is probably time to change the banner on this page in fact.........

So I started going through Stumble upon......I love that, if you don't have it, it's great, check it out. And saw a picture of a woman looking through the blinds.....I thought......hmmmm I can do that. So if I would have been really industrious, I could have just taken the stupid picture of me looking through blinds, but never one to take the easy route, I set off to "create" the illusion. Now the initial thought was me looking out the blinds but after several tries and not finding the right starting pic, I decided what the heck and went the other route. Someone looking through to me. Now I didn't have alot of time, but in the end I was quite satisfied with the outcome.

Of course as you can guess, I used my very favorite filter in the whole wide world......Topaz Adjust. I see in my email this morning they have some upgrades out so I'm excited to check that out. So with that filter and with a little cleaning up of the photo and a few tweaks here and there, creativity addiction successfully quashed, at least until the monster rears it's head again... : )

Akvis - Decorator - NEW FILTER!

OMGosh, I am so excited. I just sampled a taste of a new filter. It's by Akvis.com and called Decorator. After seeing this plug in mentioned in an online newsletter from graphics.com, I checked it out. I was really impressed by what it can do. I am thinking there are a ton of applicable uses for this little jewel. When I went to the akvis site I also noticed many more plug ins that I'm hoping they have available to demo.

In decorator specifically, this is what it does:

Decorator v.1.

Resurface and Recolor Have you ever seen a car made of brick? A statue dressed in fine clothes? With AKVIS Decorator you can create things that were unimaginable even to Mother Nature. The Decorator plug-in allows you to change the surface of an object in a realistic manner. Select a part of an image – a dress on a girl, a car, a piece of furniture, etc, and apply new textures to it. The girl can have her dress painted in gay patterns, dotted or chequered, appear as if made of velvet or satin, or even of wood or candies. There is a great variety of built-in patterns to apply - from fabrics to stones and metal, from food to nature elements. You can apply your own textures – just save a square pattern as a jpg file and load it into the library. Unlike the "bucket-fill" tool in many photo editors, the plug-in follows the underlying features of the object, the texture that already exists, and makes the new color or texture look natural. Applying a snake scale to a car’s surface can be fun, but of more practical use is to apply AKVIS Decorator for design purposes. With this software you can quickly choose a suitable design for your apartment by playing with different colors and patterns for furniture, walls, curtains, decorations, etc. It’s useful for designers to show the customers the same room in different versions or for web-designers to represent the same items in an online shop (china-ware, blankets, clothes, piece of furniture, etc) in different colors/patterns. By AKVIS tradition, the program has a simple interface, easy grasped even for newbies. In the plug-in’s window you go to the Texture tab and select a texture from the library (you can adjust its color and frequency of the pattern), press the Run button and get a wonderful result. If needed, you can adjust the brightness and the angle of lighting. If all you need is just to change the color of the surface, then you go to the Color tab and choose a new color. The program applies a texture/color preserving the volume of an object, following its folds and creases. The new pattern looks absolutely natural and makes you see things differently.  Totally cool. Here is a before and after I did.   If you look closely you can see, Lady Liberty has on a jellybean robe! New meaning to the words, cool beans, huh? I checked the cost and it looks like a home use license for this program is about $60.00, for business, about $85.00. Since I work in education, there is no extra money, so I will use the demo until they take it away. Maybe if I can produce enough cool stuff in the meantime, my boss will shake loose of a few pesos and buy this sweet puppy for me....... OR the company could send me a copy.......that would be ultra nifty. I'll try to check out the other items offered and give you the scoop.

Here Kitty, Kitty

Well, once again I am displaying my own version of animal magnetism. I'm an animal magnet that is, now I am not home, I am on my way to watch my niece play softball in Houston (she is on the Purdue team). But I am going via Oklahoma which is where I am now. I am from Kansas meeting my sister from Missouri, in Oklahoma to fly to Texas to watch my niece from Indiana, play softball. I know - crazy. Anyway, sitting here at my aunts house last night and I hear a sound. I was just sure I heard a cat. Now if they had a cat here that would not be such a big deal but they don't have a cat......they have a dog, a really big dog. I made the comment that I heard a cat and my aunt argued profusely that it was not true. Finally I was just sure and went to the door. And sure enough a little adolescent kitten was outside but desperately wanted inside. I opened the door and she came right on in and when I picked her up she immediately starting purring. She seemed extremely skinny so I went in search of food. I decided on the gourmet meal of dry dog food mixed with a little sour cream. MMMMM, she loved it, or at least she ate it. I checked her over seeing no fleas or bugs or otherwise unhealthy looking problems so I let her stay in with me. It was bedtime so I let the cat sleep in the room with me. She was very good and woke me up at 5:00 AM to go outside. She has decided she likes me and follows me everywhere. She has also decided that I should not work on the computer at all, the minute I start typing she wants to sit on the keyboard or on my shoulder. But now she is sleeping kind of worn out from all the exploring. I haven't named her because I don't want to have ownership..........but i was thinking about Dot - because she has a big white spot on her side and Dot is short for Dorothy and after all, Dorothy is a very Kansas name.

Paige

This is a picture I took of one of my co-workers daughter, Paige. We needed some shots of a elementary age child reading so she popped in and obliged. I was very pleased with the outcome, especially with no set up or pre-planning she was a super star. In this photo, I loved her expression, especially her eyes. The effect was achieved by first desaturating the photo (make sure you keep an original full color, just in case : )  turning the slider down to 0 (in Photoshop) and then I did not use the standard sepia filter, I put a slightly transparent color of brown over the top. I went back to the original colored layer made another copy and placed it on the very bottom. I reduced the saturation color until I was pleased that her lips were a faint pinkish, I went back to the black/white layer and erased with small increments of percentage of the eraser tool until the color of her lips was barely visible. I did basically the same procedure with her eyes and at the end put just a slight color on her cheeks. I love how this turned out.

Another work project -Just Desserts or Go Ahead, Make Their Day

This is a graphic I created for our specialist Reneé Smith to use in her podcast for parents. It is called "Just Desserts" and is dinner table learning games parents can use with their kids to help maximize the time the children are "captured". The podcasts will be located at the site, My Kid's Turn. Since the theme was desserts I used a graphic I had made for some greeting cards I had made. The original image was on a card with the inside sentiment of "You were born to be a star". I used this card to send to kids I knew that had done something good. It's always nice to get an attaboy from someone other than your parents. I took the picture in my kitchen one day when I was baking cookies and once again used my very favorite in the world filter for photoshop - Topaz Labs - to get the effect. So when it came time to pull together something for the Just Desserts project, I knew exactly what I wanted to use.

I am putting a blank one here at the bottom feel free to use it to make your own card. All I ask is the you don't take credit for the graphic yourself or make money from it's use. Make someone feel like a superstar today!

In case you either don't feel comfortable enough or tech savvy enough to create your own card, I have linked to one you can just download, print and sign. There are two cards to a page and they will fit in a standard 5 3/4 x 8/ 3/4 greeting card envelope (available where computer supplies are sold).

You blink and they're gone..........

My picture for this week is a graphic I made to use on the swim schedule for last year. Like many sports teams they make a poster to post in businesses around town. The high school is large enough that it generally doesn't make sense to try and have all the team members, so the seniors receive a little special attention and recognition by being featured. The picture on the surface probably isn't that impressive, however let me share some background. The boys wanted the white t's and jeans, so I thought maybe we could grunge it up a bit with being in front of an old building where I love to take pictures. I also used one of my very favorite products, a filter for photoshop called, Topaz. LOVE IT! Well, the picture itself should have been fairly straight forward except for the day of the pictures, not everyone was available. Not giving up, we shot without them...... Now some would have said too bad, so sad, you just won't be in the picture, but not me, the mother in me wanted all of them in it.

We set up with the five that showed up and did what we could. I took two more the following week at the school and then the other two separately when we could. It was kind of a challenge but I think we managed to pull it off and no one knew they weren't all there at once. The boys were even amazed and it gave me the opportunity to remind them not to believe everything they see in print.

The seniors from last year were very special to me, considering one of them was my own baby. When I first saw this picture again it made me think how quickly it all passed. From a sputtering little toddler in the bath tub to a gigantic fish in the pool. And at 6'4" when he wore his full body suit, he was quite intimidating, like a big shark. It still makes me smile when I think of the first time I saw him with that on......... oh my. He even had a little speech he made at the end of the year about his "magic suit." I remember once the paper was interviewing after a meet where he had done particularly well and he was quoted as saying, "it was the new suit, I just felt faster" or something like that, he took a lot of ribbing about that for a while. At the end of the year I made books for the coaches and each kid had a page and was encouraged to write a personal note to the coach and we typed it and included it in the book. I used the poster picture for the cover and another picture of many of the medals for the back. It turned out really well. And in Brett's graduation book, I included a page about the "magic suit".



Looking back it is hard to believe that one minute they are needing a bandaid because they fell and skinned their knees and are sure they are going to bleed to death  and the next they have blood running down their legs from trying to shave their sasquatch-like legs with a disposable razor. (swim parents will get that...)

I know the phrase- you blink and they are gone - is so cliché, but it is so true. And now I've blinked.

sunflower

I have decided if nothing else, I am going to try to post a picture of the week. I will tell a bit about the picture and what if any changes have been made.

I took this picture as I was on my way home from work one day. It was growing beside a fence and I jumped out and snapped the picture. I needed a background picture for a poem. I cropped out the sunflower, off centered it and enhanced the color. I created a background and then used a photoshop filter to create the watercolor look.