Hello! Gonna be random and yell GO LEAFS GO!

Ahem

When I was sick there for a week it really messed me up. I have to find some time to get back into my usual creative mode because I just haven’t felt like doing a whole lot of drawing lately. I mean, I’m still doing creative things with my photographs, and I do a little doodle on each one, but I’m talking about the bigger projects.

I’m not going to rush it or force things though. I’ll take my time and see what happens throughout the rest of this week. Maybe an idea will hit me, like something that I just have to put down onto “paper”. Oh! Here’s an idea, during the hockey game tonight (did I mention Go Leafs Go!?) I’ll have my sketchpad handy and do some doodles. Real paper for once! We’ll see what I can come up with. Maybe it’ll spark something.

It’s creepy hallway time!

The photographs that I took today of this apartment hallway ended up a little too grainy. So I felt that I had to artify it up a bit. Remove the color, add a bit to the exit sign there, and get some kind of interesting angles going!

It’s kind of funny, you know? I’ve never been all that much of a horror guy. Movies or otherwise. But my absolute favorite thing to photograph is creepy stuff. Well, whether you think some of my stuff is creepy or not, I’m trying real hard to get it to look this way. I wonder if I’ll ever look back at 2017 as the year I discovered this about myself. It’s certainly very new to me! And I’m not trying so hard (yet) to accomplish the dark imagery where I’m doing my research, or figuring out how to best build tension into an image and things like that. I’m just going with what feels right as I’m taking pictures or editing them.

I heard him singing from a little ways away, and as I walked by he continued to sing, while looking right at me. He stayed around just long enough to take this photo. I took a step forward to get a better shot but he swiftly flew away.

I took a whole lot of other interesting photos today, despite it being pretty dark due to the cloud cover. I think I’ll save those photos for another day though, rather than share them all right here like I did in yesterday’s post. You never know when you’re going to have a day with bad weather or something, preventing you from getting decent shots. I like to have extra photos from previous days that I can use, just in case.

Right off the bat I want to say that you need to do yourself a favor (if you like seeing my pictures, that is) and check out this post I just now wrote on my Patreon page. It’s free for everyone (as the vast majority of my posts are!) to check out, and I made it simply because I had a hell of a time picking out my favorite photograph for the day, so I cheated and posted them all on Patreon (7 images in total). Besides, it gave me a good excuse to catch up with my wonderful and generous patrons to let them know what I’ve been up to.

Some days I struggle a little bit while I try to find a single photograph to share as my daily image. Today it was kind of the opposite as I had 7 that I really liked! You see, I’m kind of tying days of the year so a single image. I don’t know why, but it’s very important that I pick the correct photo that represents how I felt for that day, where I traveled to get the shot, and the weather too. It’s not a rule or anything, and I don’t set out to try and do that for every single day, but when I get home and look over everything, I want to make sure it’s a good shot that has some meaning.

Anyways, today there was meaning in 7 photographs! I narrowed it down from like 20+ to start, and even a lot of those were really good. In the end a lot of ’em looked similar to others but just weren’t quite “there”, or I felt it would be too much work to crop and re-color them in order to get them as good as I’d like.

Anywho, today was a good day. I’ve been sick for a couple weeks but I’m on the mend 🙂

I know tomorrow is gonna be even better, even though tomorrow isn’t my birthday anymore!

This is still my favorite tree.

I felt well enough today to actually go outside and take a few pictures. I feel that I’m slowly getting over this cold, or flu …or whatever it was. Which is terrific. It was nice to sit around for a few days and pretty much do nothing but watch new TV shows, but I have some projects that I need to work on, and I haven’t updated my Patreon page with anything in over a week!

I shared a few other photo artwork things that I thought were pretty neat. It was nice not only going out and taking pictures, but spending a little more time in Photoshop messing around with some stuff. So check those out here on my Instagram! I think they’re pretty good 🙂

I haven’t been outside very much in a couple days as I’m still feeling pretty sickly. I have a feeling I’m on the mend? Maybe? I don’t know really, but I certainly hope so. A few symptoms have gone away, but now I’m just overly tired and my head hurts a bit. I’m trying a bunch of various herbal teas, and trying not to go too crazy on the Advil! Anywho, I’m well enough to sit at my laptop and draw my little photo doodle, and type a few paragraphs up!

This photo I chose for today was from a few days ago, and I don’t believe I shared it anywhere. I feel like I’ve taken photos like this one a bunch of times, so that’s probably why I didn’t choose it for my daily photo when I took it. Though, I’m sure I just had something I liked more at the time. Personally, I really love taking photos at dawn even though I haven’t been able to do that very much yet. The year is still young!

No matter how sick I am, there’s no getting off of this train I’m on. That’s what I think of when I look at this photo. I’m still doing my post for the day, despite how much I want to sit here and do nothing.

I saw on the Patreon message boards that some people were talking about doing a 100 day challenge, where you create artistic work for 100 days in a row. I wrote a pretty lengthy (and somewhat rambly) comment about how I did my 2014/15 creative habits project for 365 days in a row, and how I’m working on a new one now. I finished by saying how it effected me after I completed it by helping to keep me productive!

I got a reply from someone today, thanking me for sharing my story. What I wrote made them want to try something like this, and they specifically mentioned that it helps knowing that I was more productive after finishing.

Cool stuff! Seems I’ve inspired someone!

Day 75 done! Gotta keep the train rolling.