I have been fooling around with Photoshop Elements. The program had been sitting on my hard drive, used for nothing but the occasional cropping and/or enhancing of a picture. In other words, I was really under-using the program.
I’m a huge fan of quotations, song quotations, book quotations, even more so if they are on a fancy background. So I decided to make some of my own. I skip on over to my favorite stock photo site, and lo and behold, they have gorgeous backgrounds. Problem is, these backgrounds not only come with a large price, you also have to credit the designer (in most cases.) Plus, there were so many other restrictions and small print that it made my head ache just to try to figure them all out.
Hmmm. What to do? Do I spend massive amounts of cash on backgrounds (cuz you can’t buy just one)? Or do I …..what is that over there in the corner of my screen, is that PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS?
I started making my own backgrounds.
And it’s not that hard. Elements is not as complicated as Adobe Photoshop and it was pretty easy for me to catch on, especially with the huge number of tutorials that are available on the web.
Started with:
Ended with:
The bonus in all this is that it gets the creativity flowing. While I’m working on a color scheme for yet another banner, I find my mind working on a plot point in my story. Double bonus is that I can quickly open a Word doc and type out the string of thoughts that I had.
I’ve often used crayons and/or pastels in the past to sketch and draw when I feel I needed another creative outlet, but those results haven’t been much good. At least in Photoshop I get a usable result!
What is a hobby that you have that gets the creative juices flowing?
Strangely enough, mowing the yard gets my creative juices flowing. I live in the country, so between the smell of honeysuckle and the peacefulness of being outdoors I find it a great time to think and create. I typically keep a small notebook with me so I can write down bulleted points to remind myself later.
That’s really interesting, Josh! Mowing the lawn is one of those “mindless” tasks that you don’t have to think about when you do it, leaving your brain to roam free. Thanks for commenting. Perhaps I’ll have to try mowing the lawn once in a while. 🙂
Because I have no visually artistic ability whatsoever, I look at pictures. I think I spend just as much as much time purchasing pictures from fotolia.com as I spend writing.