Writings

Writings
Miscellaneous Writings and Musings

Maelstrom

Maelstrom
A genie and her rock band

(Novel and Short Stories)

Steal Tomorrow

Steal Tomorrow
Murder, Mystery, First Love, and the End of the World

(Novel and Short Stories)

My Books and Stories

My Books and Stories
Where to Buy, Read, Download

About My Artwork

One of the fun things about non-traditional publishing, such as POD and blog fiction, is that you have total control over how you want your writing to look. Weird fonts, colors, pictures, no problem! If you’re in this game for the pleasure of the creative experience, you’re limited by nothing more than your patience and technical expertise.

For my serial blog fiction that later became My New-Found Land, I typically used photographs from my vacations, altered with the “chalk and charcoal” filter in Photoshop. My first attempts were not so good and it sometimes added hours to each night’s post. But after a couple of months I got to where I could turn out a new “drawing” in minutes.

Sometimes the drawings illustrated a story...














And sometimes they were the story.














I also became adept at altering photographs (my own and those given to me by friends), removing and adding things before turning them into charcoal drawings...















or pen and ink...











or into colored pencil or pastel.














Photoshop is maddeningly open-ended in terms of what you can do with it. I’ve barely scratched the surface and even the people in my IT department who are light-years ahead of me are quick to say that they still feel like amateurs, that no one ever really feels like an expert.

This is something all artistic endeavors have in common. There is always more to learn and always a new direction to grow.

3 comments:

Phyllis Hunt McGowan said...

Hi,
thought I'd come and check out your page as you did mine. I'll browse around a bit- thanks for your thoughts about windy cliff tops :)

March 8, 2008 at 10:30 AM
z said...

I have always been fascinated by photoshop and doing what you are doing, turning it in to drawings or pastels. Maybe that will be my next thing to tackle, after poetry and fiction.

May 27, 2008 at 5:39 AM
Alice said...

oh that barn, that heartwrenching, barn. gorgeous.

May 9, 2009 at 1:11 AM

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