When I started working in Photoshop in 1995, it seemed that everything I learned was the result of some sort of stumbling accident. In many ways, I think that's one of the best was to grow creatively because it forces to adopt a greater appreciation for the mistake - and welcome it when you slip on the banana peel.
I suppose the accident that I most appreciated was finding a way to change a brush from "normal" to "dissolve". What it did was enable me to create shading that appeared (at least in the hi-res tiff file) a "spattered toothbrush effect" -- the same technique that was employed by the great European poster artists of the Mid-20th Centruy. Quite obviously I am not the only illustrator/designer inspired by Cassandre, Carlu, Morvan, Villemot, etc, but sometimes it has been discouraging to take that hi-res 400 dpi file, convert it down to a 72 dpi jpg for the web, and suddenly the intentional coarseness of the shading looks more like anal-retentive airbrushing (trust me, it's not -- my impatient nature just wouldn't be able to cope with the time required to cut friskets). In fact, I have had a person at The New Yorker "marvel" at my ability with an airbrush.
Clearly, I'm, doing something wrong.
I worked up this generic idea Saturday afternoon, but when I created the lo-res web version, I thought I'd run the thing through a filter -- and added some noise. That certainly gets the art a little grainier, and while it works okay on a piece like this where my color palette is greatly reduced, I'm not sure it would work when I'm doing a usual full-saturation piece.
The point? Time for me to experiment and slip on some banana peels again.
My son Ryan, a brilliant graphic design major at RISD (so brilliant that he's employed by Apple in the summer and WHILE he's at school) was here last week and sat me down to watch a YouTube video of Steve Jobs effectively burying OS9 in a coffin and referred to me as "gramps" for my continued attachment to Photoshop 3.0.
He installed CS for OSX on my G5, and now I just have to get the courage to play with it.
Surely I'll fall flat on my face and ass in the process, but it's really the time to take the leap from 1995 to 2006.
