Work as Art

It is either this blog or therapy tonight. I worked on art work for the PCPC art show tonight. It was so much like work. And work was really rough today. We got busy and all the usual challenges were there. It was nice to have some distraction. I haven’t had much sleep this week. I’ve stayed up reading, had trouble unwinding after class and then just had a lot on my mind. I haven’t talked to my counselor for about a month and I know I need to. I miss her because we are really just friends now. She is writing curriculum for an online Biblical Counseling course, so she is busy. She has taught at DTS and is a writer. She is always a great encouragement to me.

For the art tonight I took the new scan that didn’t lose the grayscale and once I found it on my hard drive I cut out the drawing shape in photoshop. Next I had to find the background photo on my hard drive and resize it and put it through a watercolor filter. Then I placed the cut out drawing on top. I moved it around a bit. Then I tried to find where I wrote down the finished size that I submitted when I registered for the show. It is nowhere to be found. I made a new size up and hope it is close. 22 x 28 inches. I am writing here in case I ever need to know what the finished size is like when I buy stretchers and a frame.

Next I resized the artwork and saved it as a jpeg, CYMK. That is because the printer will convert it if I don’t. I want to convert it myself. It is a graphic artist thing. I want the control, not to give it to the machine. Then I saved the file in a smaller size in RGB for the web. This all takes time because the file is BIG. Writing this out makes it sound simple, but I almost crashed photoshop when I converted the file to a pdf for Kinkos. I have to walk away from the computer when the large files are converting, resizing or saving. I plan to take the file tomorrow to have it put on canvas.

Interestingly enough the day I redid the scan and decided to go for the canvas my friend Tim came into the print shop to work on some of his products and he wanted to show me his canvases. He does something very much like I do on canvas, so he gave me the inside info. And I discovered watercolors work best on top. So I was very excited and thought Tim’s visit was a God thing.

Now I need to find out when the banner people are at Kinkos. And then the next step will be to add watercolor on top of the canvas. I am going to have three canvases made. I also plan to have some done on the color copier at work. I need to resize the artwork for that and I don’t think I can handle that tonight. It has just been too long of a day on the computer doing work.
On a brighter side, tomorrow at work a lady from a church in Plano is coming to drop off files so I can design them a brochure. That will make me happy. Also I made arrangement with my artist friend Brenda to go gallery hopping on Saturday. She has been a friend to me in a time when I really did lose most of my friends. She is a pretty cool lady, but her sticking it out with me make me love her even more.

It amazes me how writing like this calms me and helps me put things into perspective.