Carte de Visite: Why Photoshop made me Cry
I am not normally a crier. I shout. I pout. I get really withdrawn and quiet. But rarely do I cry. But the latest project in my Visual Thinking and Web Design course had me in tears. We were tasked with creating a Carte de Visite–a visual calling-card meant to visually represent us in our current state. Using Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator (respectively), we learned about layers, pixels, masks, vector and raster images. I had to watch MANY YouTube videos and redo or start over an image at least 10 times before coming up with an okay-looking image. Frustration, apparently, is a trigger for me. But I am proud of what I made (if not completely satisfied with it). I am proud of it because I finished it. And for awhile, I didn’t think I could do that.
Creative projects excite and frustrate me. I am really creative and conceptual in my head–I feel that I can come up with very unique ideas and images–but I struggle to make those ideas concrete. (Maybe I’m just the ideas-guy?). The final product (below) is a very conceptual representation of my (and probably many others’) current state. What with the pandemic, the election, my job, the environment, you name it, it has been very difficult to remain “above water.” But I am still here. And I am still fighting. And I would struggle and cry through Photoshop and Illustrator EVERY DAY if it meant that I was learning something new.
