I was working on a pic (the totoro one), and my wife asked me how much time I’ve spent on it. And I answered that it was only around four or five hours, including extra searching for reference pics (and the whole background I designed of a Japanese country road that I just covered up because the rain looked better). I told her today that these days, I can spend more like 12-20 hours on a photoshop piece for this blog.
I also said the time it takes me to do my photoshop stuff has increased a lot, because I’m more interested about the quality and technique, whereas in the past, it was lots of posts of nonsense that took little time as copy/paste.
So… this is a really difficult thing to explain.
Photoshop is my paintbrush. My method of self expression. I don’t necessarily think of it as a hobby. My blog is the hobby. This is my art. And it is funny or silly or mostly jokes but it really is how i consider it as art.
It varies of course. Sometimes what I do is more about a little joke or a quick replacement image. Whatever. I doodle too, with Photoshop.
And my wife asks me what if I did different kind of subjects. And… I don’t know… I’m not sure how to answer that. The reason I stick with BBC Sherlock stuff is because I’ve just been doing that for a long time and maybe it is the colour paint I’m interested in.
Mind you, I don’t share everything I photoshop or design for fun. And I do oodles of that. I made a logo today of a fictional IT company headed by a ninja turtle called “Donatello does machines” (I’m still congratulating myself for that one, I might share that sometime)
And I STILL get people asking me why don’t I monetize my skills, and dude, I fucking do. That is my job, I’m a designer, and a big chunk of that is making tweaks to pictures and changing art and cleanup. I layout textbooks, I just did a l learning module for a dying language to teach to kids, I made a book about birdwatching and I’m making a political campaign for a pretty cool guy. When I’m done that, I put funny hats on Sherlock and cats on Lestrade because it is fun.
I had a friend’s mom tell me when I was in high school “nobody likes work. Work is work and it will always be terrible.”
That affected me for years, i thought i was wrong and I probably shouldn’t be a graphic designer as a job, because I love it so much. So I went to school for a poetry/psychology degree because I thought I’d be a teacher. When I finished school, I realized I would make a shitty teacher. What I wanted to be was a graphic designer.
So i did. And every paid job I’ve had since I was fifteen has been in graphic design. And I’ve been making nonsense photoshop side-projects for just as long.
My fun stuff is my blog, because I get to make my little dolls dance and play in the playground I create.
And I fucking love it.
we love it too! thank you for making your art and sharing it!
your work is amazeballs and always brightens my day (and i totally get the zen of photoshop, it helps me relax too)
As someone who was interested but not motivated enough to learn (studies, life, budget constraints etc got in the way), I admire your work. Even the old silly ones! Your work always put a smile on my face (and I do apologise for not reblogging every time).
You know? I never “learned” photoshop, not conventionally. I didn’t take a class, I didn’t do any tutorial. I just sort of sat myself in front of the 1997 version and just made what I figured I could. And it was all trial and error since there really was no internet resource because I’m pretty sure we didn’t have the internet at that time.
I started before Photoshop had layers. I started before the majority of the features well-known today even existed. And as I said, I just figured out as I went because I was interested. It involved a lot of scanning, since google image search was definitely not a thing (remember when google image search was an algorithm programming game? I played that for ages).
There are new features being added into Photoshop practically every month, and now, it feels like a whole different program, more about AI than the fun part. I do my best to avoid that because it isn’t fun, let alone moral. I used it a bit when some of my clients requested things I couldn’t possibly do, extending a non-existent background, for example.
But then there was a piece I used maybe 8 layers to redefine Lestrade’s jawline because the angle was awkward, and that made me a lot happier that if I used AI Photoshop to fix it.
So yeah, for most of my life, this has been in the background, with learning by osmosis and not being afraid of looking things up if they don’t make sense.
People have asked me if I want to go back to school and get the shiny piece of paper degree in it, and honestly, if I wrote a syllabus I could teach the class. Not worth it.
Moral of the story? Play around! Figure out the basics for what you want to do! Look things up, but don’t be afraid to fuck around and figure something out.
Maybe this goes for everything, every skill. I bet most people start bad. Ok. Do it bad. Eventually maybe you’ll be 27 years into a professional career you somehow stumbled into because of a passion. Or maybe you’ll realize you don’t need it to be a career it’s just something really satisfying.
Maybe the point is staying curious long enough to see where it takes you. Sometimes the best things start with nothing more than messing around and refusing to quit when it’s still messy.
You brought tears to my eyes.
This is so true... About everything...
I'm so glad you were able to do this, and maybe someday I too will finally be able to get myself to do all the things I want to (photoshop, sign language, embroidery, guitar etc...). Each day just passes in a blur of things I HAVE to do and then there's no energy and time for what I WANT to do... Life, I guess!
