journeymanjim

I have a new camera.

Jim

It's been a long time since I did any painting. I bought some acrylics recently and my friends and I have made some interesting pieces together (sometimes, you have beers, you're drunk, there's music playing, and yet it feels like there's no time like the present to sit down together and be creative). Since they're collaborative pieces I won't post them up on here, but I have done a few of my own paintings at least. As I said in my last journal entry (which I made a whole year ago; my, time flies), I've never been very technically good at drawing or painting, but I still like how most of them turned out. It's great starting out with a blank sheet of paper and not knowing what it's going to look like in a hour or two.
Anyway, I think I am going to be focusing more on writing stories and music in the near future, but I may still have time to do a few more paintings too. We'll see!

Jim

Up till now I've been using livejournal for this kind of thing, but as I now am so enthralled by this website I think I might start making entries here. I've known about DA for many years but never really explored it much. I have never been much of a visual artist. Can't draw very well, never felt I've had the talent to make anything more than a chirpy cartoon character, but I've always written stories, and like writing music too.
However, I was recently bored and looking through a magazine section in a local supermarket in Romford, and noticed a mag called Creative Photoshop. I had a flick through, and saw some of the tutorials, explaining how to make really professional-looking images and illustrations. I knew that photoshop was a pretty nifty tool for photo manipulation, sticking friends' heads on other people's bodies and the like, but the thought that I could learn how to make incredible works of art by getting to grips with the software really appealed to me. For someone not great with technical drawing, painting and such, this really inspired me and made me realise that you don't need to be great at those things to make cool visual art.
So I have started learning some of the tutorials and have made a few things. I haven't posted many on here yet, and I'm currently in Sweden, but when I get back to England in a couple of days, I will probably upload some more of the pieces I made.
Browsing through galleries here has really inspired me, and I have a lot of ideas that I want to work on, so hopefully I'll be adding new stuff fairly frequently, so long as other work doesn't get in the way too much. I'm writing a novel, as well as music, so having a job on top of all that can make it hard to get things done as quickly as one would like. But we'll see.

Jim