“All progress is experimental.” John Jay Chapman
Progress
Author: Anna Cull
Reinventing myself (an annaversary post)
Today is my little blog’s fourth anniversary🎈🎈🎈🎈 and so I thought I would go back in time to the very beginning. Here is my first post from 13th March 2012. Have a creative day.
A couple of years ago, I started an illustrated journal. I was inspired by Danny Gregory and his book The Creative License and I wanted to see if I could draw.
One month and 19 sketches later, I drew Villa 10…
…and the road home (among other things).
I enjoyed sketching so much that I decided to take an art course at the Design & Arts College in Christchurch, New Zealand.
originally posted 13th March 2012
From the sky
“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.” Pablo Picasso
Decide what to do
“It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do.” Elbert Hubbard
Having decided to paint this photograph of bunting flags and sun umbrellas, I played around with colour options and cropped them to fit a square canvas (see below), and I ended up with two versions that I like equally — and so I’m now going to paint both of them.
Yes, I think Mr Hubbard makes a very good point.
WIPs to follow soon.
Say hello to Affinity
The cute sketch of Jasper I posted yesterday turned out to be the last project I will (probably) ever do in Photoshop. It’s a long story but the short version is that when I updated my Mac operating system a couple of weeks ago, my first update in six years, I lost the ability to use my Adobe software (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign). I had read somewhere that my software wouldn’t work properly if I didn’t uninstall and reinstall it and so that’s what I did. Silly me. Down the rabbit hole I went. Reinstalling them didn’t work. Backups didn’t work. My software was no longer recognised and all was lost. It was really quite upsetting but not entirely unexpected.
Now I’m not telling you this because I’m looking for sympathy. I’m also not looking for solutions or workarounds. I’m not even going to contact Adobe to try and sort it out. Really? Yep. It’s a done deal — I’ve been on borrowed time with my CS5 software for years. I knew this day was coming and, now that it’s here, I’ve decided to embrace change.
The short-term pain of losing CS5 has given way to the discovery of Affinity’s award-winning graphic design and photo editing software. Check out their product videos — they’re really impressive. I have now jumped ship and am learning how to navigate Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo. Thankfully, it’s fairly intuitive, the GUI looks and feels familiar, and there are lots of online video tutorials. I don’t have a replacement for InDesign yet but I am eagerly awaiting Affinity’s release of Publisher later this year. The Affinity software is also very reasonably priced (no subscription, which helped to seal the deal for me) and they are offering free updates.
If you’re a Mac user (sorry, it is Mac only*), I recommend having a look at Affinity. I think it’s awesome. I love that I can import my old psd, ai, and pdf files. I also love that I’m now using creative software that is current and not six years old (that’s the equivalent of about half a century in software years).
So I’m saying goodbye, Adobe. There will be no more tears. I have no regrets. It was fun while it lasted.
* Affinity have announced that they plan to launch Designer and Photo on Windows later in the year.
Jasper
Caught! A true story. Jasper’s puppy portrait now has pride of place in his owners’ littlest room.
How could I resist drawing this photo?! That face! Those eyes! Oh Jasper, you’re not that small any more, are you?
Anna Cull ~ Art & Music 