I’ve been spending a lot of time recently thinking about how art and design outside of my day job fit into my life. With thinking like that comes writing, sketching, painting, and the like. And after that comes the crossing out, erasing, and ripping apart of those things when they don’t turn out the way I pictured them in my head. After years of experience of living with myself, I know this is something that will pass – I just need to endure my inner critic for a little while longer and I will have that breakthrough on a painting that I’ve been struggling with, I’ll get that hand-lettered layout just right, and I’ll stop shaking so much as soon as I get a little more calligraphy practice in. I just need to be patient with myself.

Every time a get a little down on myself, I always end up looking through work that I’ve done some time ago. This evening, I was looking through a folder on my laptop with some photos I took when I got my first DSLR camera. It was a Nikon D40 and I do, in fact, still have it (it will have to do until I can get a dreamy Nikon Df). This was also a time when I was getting into Photoshop actions. Looking at these photos from about 9 years ago, I can see the enthusiasm I had for both of these things. Actually, I was a little over-zealous with the PS actions and I cringed at some of these images when I was scrolling through them.

This one was one of the better ones:

The focus is a little off, but it’s the only one I could find without 2,873 different filters and effects applied to it. Just wait until I can find someone to pull the files off my Iomega Zip Disk from high school – those are some doozies! In fact, I’m fairly certain that most of the PSD files on that drive are images with clouds, difference clouds, polar coordinates, and other warp tools to make it look like mushrooms were coming out of a 3-D background.