Acceptance

Hi! It's me again! I've been absent for awhile because 1. I refused to push myself last time I was creating art and kept shooting in my tiny apartment and got quickly burnt out on those limitations and 2. I got pregnant last year and growing a healthy little girl was my main priority. Now she's here (and amazing!) and we have started to settle into life with our Izzy. So I decided it was time to get back into it. This time is for very different reasons. I want to do it for myself and to find myself. Being a mom is hard and I need a little break from it sometimes. Doodling ideas, getting out, shooting, and editing are ways I can give myself some "me" time to recharge. It also gets out a lot of this pent up creative energy I carry with me when I go so long without making something.

This image took a long time to create and it wasn't so much the shooting and editing that made it take so long, it was the whole process of figuring out what I wanted to shoot and why. This is honestly more of a secondary idea that branched off from a "failed" first idea. But I haven't given up on my first idea yet so I won't go too much into it at this point. I'll get more into the evolution of this image once I create and publish my original idea for it. I don't want to spoil anything!

I actually edited this image in two parts. The first edit I finished without the sparkles or light shining down from the top. I liked it but felt like it was lacking something. So I sat on it for a few days and came back to it. Then the idea hit me to add the light to symbolize death or an afterlife or possibly hope, depending on how you want to view the image. The sparkles added more of a magical touch and could double as ash seen from the eyes of a delusional dying woman.

Once I was done with that edit I didn't touch it or look at it for another few days. In the past I had a tendency to get really excited about an idea, edit the picture in a few hours, and post it right away. I never gave it time to sit and I never gave myself a chance to add onto it. Because of that I would upload an image and my feelings towards it would drastically change within the next few hours after posting. Those feelings mostly depending on how well it did (by how many comments or likes it got). I pretended to create for myself but invested so much of how I saw the image on others.

Now I'm trying to do things differently to prevent this from happening. I want to only post content that I am proud of; content I worked hard on and has some meaning to me. The only way that was truly going to happen was if I took a step back and gave myself some time. Ultimately as long as the image came together in a way I was happy with, who cares how well it did? I want to do this for me, after all. I can't let myself get in the way of that.

I came back to the image yesterday and couldn't find anything else to improve upon it. Overall I'm happy with this image. I'm hopeful that in the near future I will venture outside more to take my images. I always love what the outdoors have to offer and I tend to get really burnt out shooting in the same space with the same angle and the same background all the time. I don't want to get burnt out. I want to grow and push myself. Getting outside is the next step to accomplishing this.

I decided to make a speed edit:

In the past I've created some speed edit videos and I really enjoyed making them. I always love watching speed edits because it's fun to watch an image come together in a matter of minutes. I always learn something and walk away feeling inspired. I figured why not possibly do that for someone else? And, I have to admit, it's fun to watch my own process. I learn a lot from that too!

But this time I decided to add a voice over to the video talking about my process. It does require some basic understanding of photoshop (like what layers and layer masks are and what "soft brush" means) but sometimes I just talk about why I chose to do or not do something. And being honest, editing images for me tends to be one big experiment. I go in with an idea of what I want but as I'm editing I decide to try something different. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And I talk about that a bit in the video.

I really hope to continue to do more with my art this year. I want to get a picture out once a week or so but since I'm doing this for myself I have decided to simply create when I'm inspired to do so. No pressure, no need to try to impress anyone...I'm just taking some time for myself and making something I can be proud of.

Now it's time for a fun story:

During the evolution of my first picture idea, I realized that editing smoke in wasn't realistic enough and I needed "real" smoke in the picture. I was brainstorming ways I could add smoke without it actually being smoke. Then the idea struck me: baby powder! I have tons of it that we don't even use on Izzy and if I shot it at a slow enough shutter speed it wouldn't look like powder but rather it would look like smoke. So after I put Izzy to bed that night I went into the bathroom and threw around baby powder with reckless abandon.

The result was one extremely messy bathroom. Also I had baby powder caked inside my nose and ears. I did my best to not inhale while taking the pictures but as it turns out baby powder lingers in the air for awhile. That worked out great for the images because it ended up looking like actual smoke. But it wasn't so great for my poor nose and lungs. It took some time to clean up the bathroom and then myself before sitting down to begin editing. But I'd say it was worth it in the end!