Just not the artistic type...

Did I ever tell you about the night I attended a community course in Drawing from the Right Brain? One of those Adult Ed classes that was so freeingly voluntary after years of college drudgery! I was really great at the freehand, free-style drawing where the teacher had asked us just to draw whatever our hearts dictated. Oh yeah, I was really getting the feel for sliding that pencil over the yummy, slightly-bumpy art paper - the paper I always felt like such a fraud using before. I was really ready to learn the secret of drawing after years of never getting much past stick figures. I looked up eagerly at the teacher, awaiting her words of wisdom that would help transform my rudimentary lines into "Art!" She cleared the floor in the center of class and placed a chair there. Then she told us to draw the chair, from the heart. Ummm.. yeah. What I put down on paper did not look like a chair, let alone that specific chair. That was pretty much the last "Art" effort that I made in the drawing field! I guess my right brain isn't much for helping art imitate life.

However, due to years of working in the publishing field (if cookbooks and phonebooks count) I do think I developed a bit of an eye for a nicely-balanced, clean layout. Well... at least I can almost instantly spot the spelling errors! How's that for a talent??? (I almost threw in a few typos in this last paragraph as a sort of "nudge-nudge, wink-wink, know-what-I-mean? know-what-I-mean?" but then I thought that was a bit hackneyed).

I regularly read a few blogs of women that take some amazing photos and I really admire their talent and commitment. I think I do alright cataloging my life with a little digital camera, but doubt that I approach anything near an artistic level. While a few travel photos I've taken and posted on flickr.com have been included in schmap.com guides, I tend to attribute that to the fact that I took photos of weird things that no one else may have cared to photograph so I slid by on uniqueness, not artistic quality.

Lately I've heard about all these great things you can do these days with just a regular old photo... I use flickr.com to store a lot of my photos, including older ones that I've been scanning in my free time. They recently added a resource called Picnik that lets you do some of the things that Photoshop or similar programs will let you do. I thought it was kind of interesting and easier to use than the free Photoshop that came out in the last month or two. Here are a couple of before and afters that I messed around with tonight. One is a mission photo of me (yes, with a bow in my hair) and another is from my bridal shower with little Gigi baby that is now two years old! Enjoy my attempts... or feel free to shake your head in embarassment for my lack of artistic talent! Maybe I should have stuck to drawing chairs.