When I missed my post last Wednesday I figured that I would be able to get one written over the weekend and posted up here, and as the time flew by this weekend and the time of the post kept getting later and later, I found myself wondering “how late in the week is too late to post a weekly blog post?” Well, I didn’t really have to worry about it as the next post’s post date already arrived.
So I can tell you that I had a frustrating two weeks.
I spent alot of time trying to fix my old car only to find out that I couldn’t. The fuel lines were in such bad shape that once we fixed a leaky area, another spot would sprout a leak. This continued until the leak was not accessable without dropping the fuel tank out of the car. Long story short, there was more wrong with the car than just the leaking fuel line and the car wasn’t worth what the repairs would cost.
So I purchased a new “pre-owned” car.
It came with a three year Ford certified bumper-to-bumper warranty, so other than oil changes and brake pad replacements, it should be low maintenance for quite a while. This is very good since car repairs were taking up a ridiculous amount of time.
It doesn’t matter where you buy a car from, the experience is always stressful.
{I’m grateful to be able to find and purchase another car}
Another time consumer has been my part time job that averages 12-16 hours a week. I was slated for May 10th to be my last day, which would give me lots of time to finish up the work on “The Girl Who Wanted a War for Peace and Other Stories”, but unfortunately, my dog got hurt, so I am staying on until at least the end of June to pay for the Vet bill (because its a big one).
{I’m grateful to be able to earn extra money.}
{I’m grateful the dog is okay and is healing.}
My grandfather spent some days in the hospital recovering from a pneumonia, but praise God he was able to come home today.
{I’m grateful that my grandfather was able to come home from the hospital.}
So like I said, lots of stress and distractions. Things not going as planned, but still working along anyway…
My next project
It seems silly to talk about my next project when I am struggling to finish the current one but it helps to stay motivated knowing what’s going to be coming up. I just have to manage the projects so that I don’t neglect the current for the next.
I don’t really like to talk about projects before they are done because its seems to zap my motivation and the creativity of it, so I won’t tell you what it is. What I can tell you is that it is going to require a broadening of my skill set as the project will contain a lot of artwork.
I’ll be watching lots of youtube videos on making artwork in Adobe Photoshop as it will be key to this next project. Below is a comic strip that takes a jab at using Photoshop to color and create shapes.
Just in the process of making this image I learned some things that I need to do differently to get the results that I want; however, there is still a lot to learn. I think that I might have some scan setting issues that resolving would make the image look a lot better, and for some reason when I tried to make shapes, Photoshop would not allow me to change the stroke of the outlining lines.
I’ve done some comic strips in the past where I made all my shapes and word balloons in Adobe Illustrator then converted the image to a .jpeg and edited it Photoshop. Unfortunately, I felt that it caused the image to pixelate a little bit so I stopped doing it.
So if you know of some good youtube videos about making artwork in Photoshop, please post the links to the comments section.
