Inspiration for the Week

I love Mondays.  A new week.  Lots of possibilities.  So this week I thought I'd start off with some inspiration.  First off, my new office.  This is just a small snapshot.  My desk.  It's an inspiring place to work and create.  Surrounded by the things that I love.  Things that inspire me and motivate me.  We've done a lot of re-organising, painted and alsorts of other great stuff to create a place where both Steve and I are happy to be.  Happy to work.  Happy to create.  I'll do another post soon about showing the whole room and all the before and after shots.  Fun, fun, fun!

Next is VisualizeUs.  I've recently set up an account to start collecting lots of inspiring images.  Being a natural creative and a digital artist as my work, I used to just save a bunch of images to a folder on my computer.  I love these new websites where you can have them all on display.  Easy to look at.  Easy to use.  And so great to share.  Here's my list so far: http://vi.sualize.us/dianerooney/

I came across VisualizeUs via JessicaSprague.com.  I'm taking a digital design art course there at the moment.  It's awakening my muse after a very long siesta.  Time to wake up!  I'm excited to be surrounded by so much creativity, motivation.

 

And then there's the inspiration I find in the every day moments of my life.  At my Mum's over the weekend, I managed to snap this little Robin.  Gorgeous blue sky, sun shining.  Fantastic.  Love that little bird.  There's something about Robin's.

Oh and flowers.  Love, love flowers but I especially love photographing them.  And perhaps slightly more than that, love to get those photos into Photoshop.  Edit.  Edit. Play.  Add texture, of course.  Lush.

Pushing Pixels

I'm well and truly back in the saddle.  It's taken a while but I'm there.  Pushing pixels again.  Designing digital art products.  Putting together my own website.  My virtual home and work place.  Doing what I love to do and loving every minute of it.  It is bliss.

Recently I splashed out and bought a new digital SLR.  A Canon 1000D.  I used to have one but had to sell it a couple of years for one reason or another.  And just stuck with my ever faithful "point & shoot".  But as I have been building up my website and business plans, I realised that I do need a decent digital SLR.  I love taking photos of the details of every day in my life as well as my family.  I'm not a professional photographer by any stretch of the imagination.  I just love, love taking photos.

However, some photos I will be using for my business, digital art products.  Steve and I go out every couple of weeks to take texture photos.  You know the stuff, walls, doors, grass, rust, wood, etc.. etc.. Basically, anything that grabs us.  He needs those kind of photos for his 3d models and I discovered a long time ago that I can use them in my photo editing to create my blended photo collages.  More recently though I decided to put together a pack of textures to sell in my online store when it's up and running.  I'll also be using them to create brushes for Photoshop, Photoshop Elements.

Here's an example of one of the textures.  Feel free to click on it (so you get the original size) and download to try it out.  It's about 8"x6.5".  All you need to do is open the image in Photoshop, Photoshop Elements or some other image editing software, open up the photo you want to add the texture to (make a duplicate so you're not working on the original),  place the texture image on top of the photo and change the layer blend mode to "soft light" or "overlay".  They'll be a full tutorial on my webiste (soon).

Click on photo to see real size | then right click and save to your computer

Here's a couple of examples of what the texture looks like on a photo.  Just adds a lovely subtle texture.  I turned the opacity down to about 70%.  This is different for each photo.  You just have to play around with the layer blend modes and opacity to get the look you're after.

 

[click to see larger size]

Yep.  Gotta love pushing pixels!