Aw Diddums

I’ve been looking at watermarking my images. I studied one site that looked interesting, but probably isn’t worth it for a cash-strapped amateur. The watermarking plugin was ‘free’, which seemed strange… I wasn’t altogether surprised to find (on reading the terms) that it only works if you take out the subscription.

So… NOT free. Not particularly direct either… verbal tricks of that sort make me think twice about buying.

I can make my own little watermarks without paying anyone, but do they work as well? No little box would pop up with the artist’s information. The surest way of protecting work is not to put it on the internet, but where’s the fun in that?

Meanwhile I just sign things with a URL where I can be found (mental note, must not abandon my ID on these sites), and my most favourite pictures aren’t going anywhere… they rest at home with me.

I used to be able to make a simple picture if I wanted, but those days seem to have gone. For instance, I took a flower brush and used it to make a very simple wallpaper, with small flowers lying against a gradient. “Just something quick I can upload to one of the wallpaper pages.”

I should have known better. First I had to change the colour of the gradient to a grass-coloured gradient, then I put real grass in and got rid of the gradient, then made some butterfly brushes and put some butterflies in, and painted them all up a little with light, shade and texture so they looked more three-dimensional. Then Photoshop Elements crashed and lost the butterflies, so I went to bed.

Next day I made some bigger, better butterflies, and painted in some sunlight. Swithered over whether or not to put dewdrops in, but decided it wasn’t that kind of scene. Finally I made a simple little ladybird and plunked her in the middle.

Having finished, I looked at it again and said “those flowers aren’t right; the perspective is dead-on whereas the other things are slanting slightly and need the flowers to do the same. Never mind, it was only meant to be a simple picture.”

Over supper I changed my mind again and decided to delete the flowers and make some new ones. Those flowers were the REASON for the picture, and now I’m about to edit them out completely! Sigh.

I wonder if there’s a creator up there who has similar problems…. maybe he/she started out by making flowers, then added grass, butterflies, a ladybird or two, sunlight (only after making the other things) and kept on and on tinkering till he/she had an entire universe.

I can’t keep it simple any more, and that’s both interesting and unsettling.

What’s strange is how you change your mind about something you’ve written or painted… not just once, but two or three times. You create it, and either think it’s wonderful or it’s nice enough, and then you come back to it after tea and suddenly it looks horrible. You consider deleting it, but caution gets the better of you and you leave it alone. After another fortnight or month of living with it, you decide actually you like it best of anything else you’ve done recently, and enter it for a competition or a carnival.

After all that, I tend to feel that even if I’ve ended up liking it, it’s probably not all that great, but then again, other people will come along and say it’s their favourite too.

So confusing, but it’s one vacillating reason why I feel that nothing we do or see is 100% true. If it was, we would know a good thing the minute we saw it, and not hum and haw for weeks. We would like or dislike the same things. Furthermore, what comes from the heart can end up looking cheap and shoddy, often enough because so many others have followed a similar path. Familiarity breeds contempt… as does thinking we understand where someone else was coming from, and that it’s nothing new or fresh – looking back and down from our relative vantage points of maturity and experience.

But it IS all relative, isn’t it?

Being impressed by something somebody else fails to rate is often an indication of how far we have come – “yes, been there, done that…” and something looks good to us because it’s better than our previous achievements. It might not impress others, or yourself further along the line, and sometimes we fall into the same traps we saw other people fall into and meant to avoid… just because we got there ourselves and those traps were grinning wide with welcome. One way or another, achievement and failure (two sides of one coin) are merely a point of progress or a state of mind.

Exasperating… first of all I was avoiding the computer with a headache and sore eyes, and just as those were clearing up, I got stomach pains. Still fragile, but better on the whole. I have another wee arty contest to enter so I better get cracking on that.

Meanwhile, I was looking through my ScribeFire notes and found the following from a couple of weeks back which I didn’t post.

I was trying to get a bunny looking like a bunny, and Mum kept saying “it looks like a mouse!” It haunted me, so after hours of unsuccessful tinkering, I went to see if there were any hints online. I found instructions on how to get the general physique of a bunny right, and how we shouldn’t draw them like cartoon bunnies. Fair enough… but the animal in the photo looked suspiciously like a hare. The artist’s rough sketches, based on this animal, had the hare’s physique.

Meanwhile, my bunny still looks like a mouse.

PS: Another WordPressy bone of contention… whenever I add a new category, such as ‘Art’, I always capitalize it… and just at it writes itself up, it changes to lower case. I want all my categories to match each other in style, so I’m not going to leave it like that, but I can’t edit it where it is… have to search around the dashboard for the right place to edit it from, which is not sensible. Using these ‘overwriting what you put’ scripts is not the best idea either.

Searching for my style

I saw something yesterday that annoyed me. Many folk have a little piece saying something along the lines of “don’t steal my art”, which strikes me as understandable but futile, but one guy broke new ground with a general warning on his own pieces: “don’t copy my style.”

First of all, I didn’t see anything individual about his style; it looked like many others of that genre. Secondly, we are all inspired by everything else we’ve come across in our lifetimes, including this person so worried that he might be copied. Like any of us, he might well have come to it in his own time, but the likelihood is that he didn’t just make it up out of nowhere… there was nothing new about it. The piece I was looking at looked like a pale version of something from The Golden Compass.

The funny thing about ideas is that people tend to get the same ideas over and over… partly because they are drawing from the same wells of inspiration. Like when I took a photo of a cobweb with dewdrops on it, and was going to blog about it, and a little while later found a couple of blogs by other Scots around the same time, talking about these cobwebs with dew on that they’d taken photos of. There is no way that they copied me, as I never blogged about it… and I didn’t see theirs till after I thought of it. Actually, I doubt if they ever came near my blog.

He has a bit of a nerve to suggest that I (along with others) should stop experimenting and discard perfectly good examples of (cough) art I might have considered making just because it might look like stuff that’s already out there. There are many who post tutorials teaching us how to do this or that, and in the end we can combine the skills to make something of our own. They don’t complain when we post a few pictures like theirs; it’s more like “welcome to the party!” I could almost describe it as a type of internet apprenticeship, which is what it’s all about. Not “here’s my special brand… now you can’t ever do anything like this.” Like what, exactly? Perhaps I should just avoid looking at his work, and then I won’t be subliminally (or overtly) influenced. I can’t promise I wouldn’t have similar ideas on my own, without ever having seen more than two of his own pieces.

Wrongly labelled

An extra rant… things that appear in the wrong categories. It’s bugged me ever since my eBay days in the year 2000 or whenever. All people had to do was write “This is NOT a Steiff bear!” and it would appear in the Steiff listings, as if they weren’t long enough already.

There were the misspelled things that never got into the right listings, but if you were on the lookout, you might get a cheap ‘Stieff’ bear that none of the rival collectors noticed. Usually if they were serious collectors, though, they were on the lookout for misspellings themselves, hoping you weren’t noticing.

Or there were the ones with titles that just said “A lovely cuddly soft toy!” and you wanted to know (without having to look) what sort of soft toy. It might have been a Steiff. It might have been the old pink Woolworth mouse you’ve been looking for for years. But you only have so much time to spend on the search, and your old computer is too slow to look at every page that leaves you wondering. I didn’t spend much time or money on Steiff bears, but I looked occasionally to see what was out there.

And the miscategorizations spread to other fields… such as stock images. Recently I decided to look for spaceships, space shuttles and UFOs. The UFO category was stuffed full of women posing in Sci-Fi costumes, along with pages and pages of perfectly ordinary sky photos. I picked out three sky photos (not from the same pages) and would you know… they were all by the same person! I looked to see if maybe she had called them UFO Skies, or written casually in the description “this would be good with a UFO travelling across it”, because then it might not have been deliberate. But ‘UFO’ wasn’t in a single one of them, not even as part of a word… it must have been added to the search terms. Verdict: not accidental.

If I wanted a nice dramatic sky for a UFO to travel across, I would take or make my own, or search the ’sky’ section of the Stock Photos. I wouldn’t look under UFO if I already had one. A background, I mean… as it happens, I did have one of my own.

Pah.

(I ended up making my own wobbly UFOs).

Funny how quickly things change… a couple of days ago the PC was rendering Apophysis fractals, but tonight it’s rendering a 3D scene in Bryce. Life would be very dull if there was only one thing to do. I wouldn’t have thought of it but there’s a minor contest for science fiction images. My bent is much more towards fantasy, but I came across a folder of unused 3D scenes which were quite promising. Maybe, with a little work, they would fit.

Looking at the other entries, it hasn’t a snowball’s chance… but it’s literally the taking part that counts; lots of fun and new ideas.

I didn’t come here to bore everyone senseless (oh, well maybe I did, but not deliberately). I was thinking about how people make certain decisions that X is OK but Y is not… for instance, traditional photography versus digital photography. All kinds of photography versus manipulation or ‘tweaking’. Those are very broad examples; the individual permutations of biases and prejudices are endless. “I despise the brushed metal effect,” is one phrase I came across a while ago. Nobody bothered to reply. What he really meant that he thought it was overused by uncool people. On a Come Dine with Me show, someone said “you used one of those two-handled things to open the wine. The RIGHT way to open wine is…” and my mother and I looked at each other.

X is cool, the right kind, the right way, used by the right people. Y is not.

These biases start young. I was rambling round one of the arty sites and came across a conversation where someone was required to describe the process of photomanipulation. Despite the friendly reply from the photomanipulator, the enquirer dismissed it as ’simply cutting and pasting the images of other users’. That’s not necessarily true; photomanipulators aren’t barred from using their own images. And if they just cut and pasted things, they would probably not look good… there is much more to it than that.

If you think about painting a picture (traditional media), you might have a still life specially set up in the studio (various items taken out of their own environments and placed together in an attractive way). If you think about photography, there are portraits of people perched against backgrounds, graduates wearing cheesy grins and clutching false rolled-up certificates (slightly battered round the edges), models wearing evening gear and make-up. When you took a photo of wild nature on holiday, you waited for a break in the crowds of other tourists and angled the shot to avoid the telephone pole and picnic signs. Then, people enjoy movies and fiction, but they’ve never been real.

I’m referring to the expectation that photos etc are worth nothing if they are not a real, true representation of the subject. If the sunset is peachy pink and there’s a boat on the water, it should remain peachy pink with a boat on the water. I don’t understand that, as there’s nothing 100 percent natural or ‘true’ about any of it. That same stretch of sky could be glorious blue and gold tomorrow. What we see out of our own eyes or perceive with our own minds is never the full, eternal truth; still less committing it to a piece of paper and saying “this is last night’s sunset.” It’s not a sunset… it’s a piece of paper.

There’s nothing ‘true’ about painting, photography, sculpture, drawing…. none of it.

As for the ‘using other people’s stuff’ thing, well… provided you make a good image and credit the original photographers / artists (who gave permission in the first place), or avoid all of that and use your own stock anyway, then I don’t see a problem. It’s still work: searching out the images you want; using tools, skills, the mind’s eye… trying to achieve a particular result. Sometimes the ‘cheat’ is much harder to pull off than the real thing.

In the conversation I mentioned, the photomanipulator asked if the other person would like to try that genre. No, said the other person – she would never do it… she preferred to stick with the usual kind of art.

I went to see who this philistine was, and what sort of art she went for, and I didn’t find much there to support. It was all one kind of thing (not terribly adventurous) and not particularly well done. But before I got too sneery in the privacy of my own room, I checked her profile… and she was only 14.

Ah. She’s got time yet. I’m sure I was dismissive of things (and stuck in an artistic rut) when I was 14, but in time I learned life is never black and white. Rather to my dismay. Then again, what would art be if we didn’t have other shades to play with?

The arty sites have a plethora of contests, just for fun, and I’ve been finding them a source of inspiration. I’ve only entered one so far, but got an honourable mention. I’ve been working with others in view, and it’s had the effect of making me even more prolific but not actually posting anything… just in case I post something I could have put in one of these small contests. Most of them say “only new images please.”

I’m usually reasonably pleased with the pictures I turn out, but something unsettling has occurred. The last four pictures I made… I didn’t just like them; I loved them. I was using techniques I avoided before (drawing and painting) and didn’t set out meaning to; it just happened. Even stranger, I only wanted to make one of them, and that was in the nature of a quickie (to try out a Photoshop tutorial).

A short aside: I have a bit of a mental block when it comes to talking about this particular hobby. I don’t like saying ‘my art’ or ‘my artwork’ as it sounds so pompous, and usually alternate between ‘my pictures’ and ‘my images’… but that gets old quite fast. Another mental block I have is when it comes to digital stuff, I can never say “I painted” or “I drew,” as I see those being for traditional media only (real pencils, paints, paper). I know that ‘painting’ and ‘drawing’ are accepted terms in digital media too… isn’t drawing with a mouse or a tablet pen just as much a physical process as drawing with a pencil? And it’s not even as precise, half the time. Still, I avoid it, as I know if I said “I painted a picture today,” most people would assume I’d had the watercolours out.

That leaves me with the problem of how to describe the process… “I made something, created something, did something?” Icky. Overtones of school and Blue Peter.

About the four pictures I made that I liked more than I expected to… I was fairly sure none of them would work, and if they did, it would take some hard slogging to make anything of them; wouldn’t it be easier to make a vector picture with gradients and layer styles? I was in two minds about trying these projects at all. Even worse, I disliked the raw material I started out with… two ugly fractals, an artificial vector flower (made by myself in Paintshop Pro), an untidy Photoshop brush (still be to superceded… deliberately spelling that with a ‘c’…) and a shaky drawing with the small El Cheapo tablet dating from the Year 2000 which I recently dug out from a plastic bag. (It doesn’t go with Mac System X, so I had to put it on the PC… and even then the installation was a bit iffy).

The tablet is supposed to make drawing easier, but my first effort was messy and not worth a second look. I thought “never mind, I’ll send it across to the Mac so the little white Mac-mouse can clean it up.” That’s not what the tablet is for… but the shaky drawing is now in one of my Golden Four pictures.

The thing is, you often hear people say (usually of photos) that if it was bad to start with, you can’t make it good. I disagree. You could take the worst photo in the world and turn it into a thing of beauty, though it probably wouldn’t be a photo any more.

To start with, it’s all I can do to keep on with these tough projects, but as time goes by and I see signs that something good is emerging, a sense of wonder creeps in… and you couldn’t drag me away.

This might not seem to be connected, but we were watching Stargate after missing the beginning. It was about an alien city in a dome; the citizens were linked to a main computer and were being brainwashed. People were being killed to keep the population small and manageable, and the survivors’ memories were altered so that they wouldn’t notice their fellows had vanished. I was convinced the Council (or some higher body) were the villains, but they were as much victims as anybody. At the end, I said to Mum, “who was doing it?”
“The computer,” said Mum, squinting strangely at me.
“I just thought… someone must have programmed it to do those things?”
“It was the computer. It got into their minds, like it’s got into yours, and makes them all unseeing and unheeding…”

So, the computer’s the villain. Such a weaver of fantastic worlds and things that don’t exist… even pictures that aren’t on paper. Though, the other day, someone I was talking to said it wasn’t till she had one of her fractals professionally printed and held it in her hands that she realized it was real.

Sometimes I wonder what will happen when I die… will all these pictures, including the Golden Four, be zapped? My diaries burned, disks shredded, words lost? My whole life on computer, deleted.

Mum says she doesn’t care what happens after she dies. The whole planet could blow up; it wouldn’t make any difference to her. But it matters to me. Apart from caring what happens to cats, trees, and dolphins, I want to feel I’ve left some kind of mark. If the planet implodes, so do my pictures. Maybe I will be the only person (apart from Mum and the Computer) to have seen them.

It’s funny how the subconscious mind operates. The other night I dreamed a young student was procrastinating by churning out fractals and Apophysis scripts instead of studying for his exams. His study topics included fractals but he was wasting time on fractal art instead. He even wrote a little poem which he put on his site… and this is it, word for word, not a woolly half-memory of a fading dream:

The breaks are in the wrong places but it has exactly 17 syllables… like a haiku. Yes, I suppose the computer has got into my mind.

Goodness me:
Show Us What’s Happening (contest). I don’t feel inspired myself, but had been wondering if I could depict agoraphobia or even deafness; this contest isn’t a world away from it.

The other day I was brushing my teeth and pondering (don’t we all?) on the uncertainty I often feel about the day ahead. I was wondering how I would describe that if I had to. At first I thought “it’s like going to battle without your armour,” but we don’t wear armour today…

This is the nearest I can come to it: it’s like going to work in your pyjamas and bunny slippers, and everybody else speaks a different language. It’s going to rain, and you haven’t brought your umbrella or handbag, which are at home with the door unlocked. You’ve got on the bus and and realize to your horror that you either don’t have the fare or have lost your ticket, and you don’t recognize the part of town you’re in.

I hate feeling like that in the morning.

I keep writing blog posts and not posting them. I’m not even sure where they’ve got to.

I’ve discovered I can add simple elements (letters and symbols) into Apophysis to be rendered as beautiful fractal art… it’s just as well I can’t add photos and things, as I would be rendering fractals of the cats. There is now a version for Macs called Apophysis-J… I’ve not tried it yet as I’m trying to hold off. Partly for my sake, partly for the Mac’s.

A couple of nights ago I made 16 pictures. They weren’t straightforward renders or ’snapshot fractals’ as I’ve seen them referred to; but they seemed so easy. It could be I’m feeling a little tired of it now… not forever, mind you. I always come back to this.

Last night I was amused because somebody wandered past one of my art pages and said “Really crazy work you have… out of the ordinary.” I imagine that was a compliment, as he added one to his favourites (not the other crazy stuff, mind you). I don’t think I do anything different; I’m trying all sorts of things and haven’t settled down to anything in particular. Today I’m doing fractals, tomorrow it could be airbrushing. It depends on the genres you’re used to viewing.

I came up with a picture a while ago using Photoshop brushes which Mum said were like hat pins. The person who made them requires permission if they’re used commercially, and someone sent her a photo of a pizza box with her ‘hat pins’ all over it. They hadn’t asked her first.

I feel in need of a megamug of very hot strong mocha to clear the fog I’m in. I hope I find what I’ve done with the other blog posts. Maybe they fell into Apophysis by mistake, and are spilling out as floods of spirals, curls, swirls and Julias.

Normally, around this time of year, I’m muttering about crowded cafés, shops, streets and roads. Not so much this year! For a couple of weeks now I’ve been smiling happily, feeling warm and giving… I suspect it has something to do with the art sites I frequent. When people are being people around you, having their quirks, weaknesses, concerns and their strengths (largely the creative process, or at least the desire to do well at it) – it gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling!

When folk come along and add your work to their favourites, that doesn’t hurt either… all sorts of people, from teenage girls to 65 year-old guys in Finland. You have something in common with them and so you’re no longer thinking (for example) that older people play Bridge rather than get on the net, or that younger people are an alien species who lurk on street corners. When I was 16, if I’d known other 16 year-olds who were keen to share their passion for drawing, painting or photography with me, I’d have been delighted. Who knows what difference the internet would have made to me at that age?

Getting back to my recent resurgence of love and goodwill to all humankind, a possible factor is that phenomenon I mentioned in an earlier blog post: when I don’t do something very much, I glide through it with ease. If I was going to town every other day, I’d be a lot grumpier than I am now.

A couple of days ago, Mum asked me why I was grinning. I told her I got a new comment on my ‘introvert bloggers’ post and was thinking about how disastrous it would be if the internet collapsed all of a sudden. “Imagine life without it,” I said.

“Aiee!” said Mum, then (after a pause), “introverts have a warped view of life.”

Pushing away the niggling thought that I have a tendency to ‘think’ myself into tight corners, I said “but you’re an introvert yourself.”
“Yes – I’m an introvert.”
“Though you have lots of friends and sit on all those committees.”
“When I was your age, I wouldn’t have been able to give speeches and talks, but it’s not so bad now. Anyway, we can’t let idiots run everything.”
“By idiots… do you mean extroverts?”
“Er… more or less. There’s usually a balance.”
“Extroverts go out and do stuff without thinking, while introverts think about things so much they don’t want to do them?”
“Something like that.”

Hmm…

A stray memory surfaced in my mind just now. I was working on a large poster with a friend in art class at school. It was beginning to grate on me that she was so bossy; she would say “do this” and we did it all her way, though I was a better artist. I found I was scared to touch the picture without permission. Further back in this post I was complaining that I couldn’t share the fun of artwork with friends (apart from the odd scribble with felt tip pens), but what was going on here was not sharing.

One day I decided it was my picture too, and I was jolly well going to put some dots in. Of course they looked terrible, and if I’d been in my right senses I would never have bothered with them. When my friend saw them, she got very cross and painted all the dots out again, and I didn’t object. She was completely unaware, I think, that I hadn’t put the dots in because I wanted dots… I’d put them in to assert myself a little.

This is doubtless one good reason why introverts and extroverts don’t always work well together. If someone you know at work or school is acting mulishly, throwing senseless spanners in the works, it’s possible that something similar is going on. If you don’t want me to break out in a rash of dots, don’t boss me. (Ahem).

Tutorial finished… it gave me two pictures to put in my online art gallery. The first was so-so (I didn’t like the red and pink colour combination but the thing had a life of its own!) so I made another with colours more to my taste.

Today I didn’t have to walk Thundercloud, so I walked Mum instead, taking my camera along. Ran out of film (or rather card space) in the first five minutes, having taken the 512MB card instead of the 1GB card. It was a bit bright for photos anyway – it was 3pm but felt (and looked) more like noon.

I was annoyed when I framed a nice shot of the footpath with overhanging trees, “ah, lovely, just trees and Mum wandering gently along,” finger tightening on the shutter… and two sweaty joggers shot past me into the frame. I didn’t even hear them coming.

I didn’t ask for that, cosmos.

The photo you see here isn’t that one, but it has Mum in it. Get out the magnifying glass.

I’m still working on the tutorial – it’s taking me days. I wonder if some of the others were able to do it in one night? Maybe the more practised ones can.

In my last post I said I wanted a nice pink gradient the next day (meaning a more cheerful mood instead of the blue one). When I got up next morning, the next bit of my picture to be worked on was a soft pink. That’s what I’ve been working with all day. Request answered – thank you, cosmos.

I’ve gone a little quiet, I know – I’m following more Photoshop tutorials. It’s great when I find ones I can use in Photoshop Elements 2.0. So many other Photoshoppers seem able to afford the top applications.

On Wednesday night I had a dream…. it cast a slight shade, a transparent gradient, over my day. The closer we got to bedtime, the bluer the cast of my mood.

In the dream, I went to tea with one of my cat clients, doing my best to make pleasant conversation, but she cocked a sardonic eyebrow at me. I was relieved when one of her cats shot off to the end of the garden, and a terrible caterwauling arose. It seemed her cat was picking on one of my cats, Lucky. Lucky died years back, before I started this blog.

I rescued him by picking him up and carrying him back to my seat. He seemed surprised at first, then clung closely to me, purring deeply. I could feel it vibrating through my heart. He seemed to be saying “it’s such a long time since you last held me.” I was bemused to realize it myself, and couldn’t think why such a distance had grown between us.

Later in the dream I discovered I had a huge aquarium at the back of my upstairs sitting room. It contained three large fish, about 40 cm long: two sharks and a human diver. I had to carry one of the fish to another part of the house in a red plastic bucket. I could have picked any of the three – the diver, the slim pretty shark, or the strong, sturdy, moody shark… I picked the moody one. He was the most likely to bite, but I felt he would be better able to deal with being removed from the tank. After scooping him out, I was annoyed to find there was no water in the bucket – I had to dash off to get some before I could put him in.

We were possibly showing him to a visitor, after which I returned him to the tank… he was slightly limp, but recovered quickly. Nobody had been bitten.

Sharky… I wonder if there’s a connection. Cats who have passed on… one of them missing me, and the other swimming moodily in a tank.

And then thinking how people are here one day and gone the next. Dad working abroad, making a life for himself and his family – and now it’s just us. And the baby mouse… I rescued him from the cats. At first I thought he was dead, and Samson was pinning him down with one claw, but when I got closer, the little thing was shaking. His legs were so thin and crumpled under him that one looked broken, but he was just weak. I took him straight outside with some crumbs. I don’t like wearing my nice pink slippers outside, but for the mouse’s sake, I trekked them across wet grass and placed him in a snug corner near the shed. He hobbled and wobbled slowly under the shed… Not convinced he will have survived, but maybe he found a nest of leaves and slept himself to recovery.

Mum accused Samson of nibbling the top off a muffin, but I said I gave it to the mouse.

I was in Photoshop Elements painting a light bulb in a lamp, when a song came into my head… one of Melanie’s most ’sobbing’ melodies. It might have been Candles in the Rain but I’m not sure; it’s years since I’ve played her music. It wasn’t Ruby Tuesday; I would recognize it as soon as it came up.

The Photoshop tutorial was absorbing, but while working on it, I remembered a stray comment from one of the 30 or 40 others who have already followed it. She said she decided to do it because there was nothing else to do, and she was feeling sad, longing for some human contact. I became aware in my mind of all the others tracing the same lines – some quickly, some slowly, some happily, others less so.

I’d like a nice pink gradient tomorrow, please, and a different song.

Funny, I deliberately posted a picture (on a wallpaper site) that I didn’t like that much, and it almost immediately got favourited by someone. Just shows, you never know what others might like.

Why did I post it? I’m entering into a period of confusion where I want to post nice things but don’t want to post things that are too nice, just in case someone pinches them… then I ask myself why I really care.

I never posted any short stories on the internet; that was a ground rule from around 2001 or whenever I first got online. Now I don’t know… I mean, I’ve got this blog; that has short stories of my life. Sometimes I think I should just enjoy myself and not worry too much. Where pictures are concerned I’m practising, and looking at other people’s pictures (and tutorials) for inspiration. There’s a bit of give and take involved.

I find myself looking at a picture and thinking “mm, I love that one,” and putting it carefully away. “For another day,” I tell myself. Maybe never… or maybe one day I’ll be so good that I’ll post today’s rainy day pictures without a second thought.

I suppose that’s the aim.

Last night I wrote about The Blob and the Flood, then set WordPress to linger over Sharky’s silhouette while I pottered whimperingly to bed. All of a sudden I remembered part of the dream I’d forgotten – the bit connected with the university.

I was me again, as a student of 20 odd years ago. I was looking for a flat to live in by myself, one I could rent. I saw one I liked, but visited a second time before making up my mind. My parents came with a few family friends. We were scattered throughout the flat, poking around the rooms, and everybody was as impressed as I was.

“You’ve found a real corker here,” said my father, “but let Jim check out a few things before we sign on the dotted line.”

A red potted geranium tumbled off the kitchen windowsill… and that was just the start. The longer we spent there, the stranger it seemed. Things fell down with nobody near them, while machinery and other systems turned themselves on and off with hummings, whirrings and clankings. A friend scraped suspiciously at the paint where a pale blue wall ornament had just clattered off.

Standing in the gloomy, claustrophobic hall, I stared at a light and had a moment of terrified clarity. Although it was a wall light, it looked like one of those old-style bankers’ lamps, and was painted in a whiplash metallic sheen similar to a layer style I downloaded just the night before.

I called Mum, pointing at the light, which was flickering and buzzing, and emitting little cracks of lightning. In the distance, something else thudded to the floor.

“I don’t want this house,” I said. “With all of you here in the daytime, it’s charming and amusing, but can you imagine what it will be like when I’m alone here at night? There’s something about all of this that’s a bit odd – nobody’s causing any of it. I would be scared out of my wits.”

Mum nodded, and Dad arrived and said “Jim has just been saying the flat is not what it seems. It’s very damp and not particularly sturdy, but someone put in a new kitchen and has done a first class job of the paintwork. It won’t last long – shortly after you move in, it will all be peeling off.”

Maybe The Blob was the landlord and desired revenge on me for rejecting his flat. Who knows?

Notes on the image
Little lightning flashes: Obsidian Dawn brushes.
Layer styles used on lamp: Shelby Kate Schmitz.