Call me a late bloomer but the idea of focusing on and enjoying the process, or the journey rather than the goal is somewhat of a new idea for me. Though I’m sure somebody muttered words to that effect many times in my 59 years it was a bit less than two years ago when I stumbled across a book in a quaint bookstore in Boulder, Colorado. The book is titled “The Path Is The Goal” by Chögyam Trungpa.
When I began this project and built this site it was to be specifically about my new found interest in creating digital images that were given birth in secondlife.com. Yes, I considered that I might find other worlds to also create images. The virtual worlds being created are truly amazing and beautiful – all that one can imagine.
While looking for inspiration from others in the secondlife community in flickr, the idea of writing a story and creating images to illustrate it burst from some hidden corner full of wants. From my earliest days in secondlife I imagined that it would be a great place to tell a story. This is certainly a part of why I came to enjoy role play so much.
The possibility seemed magical when I thought of it this time. Not only could I travel all over secondlife (from here after, known as SL) to get beautiful images but I could build sets when I couldn’t find the right spot. Soon, I came to see that I needed specific poses – there’s an app for that – called anypose.
Next came the curiosity of how some were creating specific lighting in their scenes and when I learned of LumiPro – I had to have it. Mind you both of these have features that take a little study and effort to really use them effectively.
I was ‘ok’ with gimp as an image processor but a little envious of what I saw being done with photoshop. I actually made the photoshop jump once before but after reading rumblings about Adobe’s marketing techniques I jumped back to GIMP and I think, have become fairly comfortable with doing things that I struggled to grasp 6 months ago.
Recently, I’ve struggled with Gimp for several reasons. I have to vastly different monitors. The newest and favorite is 4K and call it age or whatever but the largest font of the UI for Gimp is still too small for my eyes. However, when I drag stuff to the older, HD monitor, Gimp fails to compensate correctly and suddenly the letters are inches tall and the window edges are somewhere off in space. It’s not conducive to work flow at all.
There have been several other minor issues including most recently artifacts that began appearing just as I was about to finish the Havana Sunset image. I struggled to find and get rid of them but in the end converting the image back from 32 bit to 8 bit did it.
In summary, while watching Natsumi Xenga doing her magic in Photoshop; seeing how smoothly she works and how she massaged things in ways that I don’t even think Gimp is capable of yet, I gave in again.
This “Spring Break 2019” series was intended as a learning process for me and it truly has been that. Not only have I learned much graphically (and will now be stepping back just a bit to relearn in photoshop what I had mastered in gimp) but I’m also learning that writing a story is much, much more than spewing a few words out that link together nicely.
Ok! I wasn’t that naive but only by doing does one fully appreciate what it takes. Character development, story line and all the twists and turns of writing have now planted a seed of interest for me too.
I will soon finish this Spring Break series and put it to bed. It has given me much fodder and yes, the characters created there will carry forward into the larger project but that will be handled differently than this ‘Spring’ series.
I hope you will enjoy that but in the interim I hope we will enjoy taking this path together. In any event, I am enjoying the process and the learning along the way.
—Aedn
