My life is a work in progress on a road with very low visibility.

I was going through some of my favorite Photoshop sites today, and something occured to me - unless you are up in the Deke McCelland/Kai Krause guru/master level of photoshop godhood, you just aren’t going to be able to perfectly duplicate natural surfaces and textures. By this I mean creating from scratch a surface/shape/texture that is completely photo-realistic. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Photo-realism is not always needed or necessary - a lot of the completely digital stuff I or anyone else does is on the level of illustration. And illustration isn’t supposed to look 100% real. That’s kind of the point.

However, there are lots and *lots* of tutorials out there (and some less than cheap books) that claim to be able to teach you how to make realistic textures from scratch. The end results of these tutorials vary - some are pretty near the mark. Some are good as abstract art. Some miss the target completely. For the beginning digital artist, all of them are a good thing, because they push you to learn the software in ways you might not have thought of before. They show you some neat tricks that you might never have come up with on your own. But what about the next step?

For me, the next step has involved a lot of photo compositing, collage, and digital enhancement. Projects where I either start with a base photograph and do cruel and unusual things to it, or take several photographs and pure digital pieces and mate them in ways nature and a darkroom never intended. For a lot of this work, I find that faking nature just won’t cut it. No matter how good the method for creating dirt, mud, wind, highlights, etc…. nothing beats an actual photograph.

Working from reference shots is nothing new to anyone who has studied art, but there are a lot of people getting into the art/design field who never had any training pior to getting their computer and discovering the possibilities of pixels. There is an attitude I see reflected in a lot of the tutorial/photoshop sites that photoshop is the *only* thing you need to create anything short of a 3-D world. Not true.

Say you’ve digitally created a great sand/gravel texture, but it’s lacking that subconcious oomph that says “real” in the back of your mind. You could play around with the lighting filter, but you could also either find a good shot of dirt/mud/ground or go out with your trusty camera after a rainstorm and snap away. Then you take the digital and the “real” images and mate them.

I really was planning on not buying anything nonessential today. Really. No splurging. So after I’d virtuously gone grocery shopping, I thought I’d relax at the bookstore for a while. Browsing only, no buying. And I manage to find two books I’ve been trying to find for ages. I’m pretty good at resisting temptation, but if I hadn’t grabbed them then, I’d have lost my chance at either of them for at least a few more years. (My luck is like that - if I thumb my nose at opportunity, fate finds a way to get back at me.)

And what were they? The Book Of Forms, (A very good poetry textbook, one which I was assigned during my junior year and foolishly sold back at the end of the semester - been looking for it almost ever since.) and Children Of The Night. (One of Mercedes Lackey’s earlier books - the first one of hers that I ever read, and one of her best. And it’s my *third* copy. This one is not getting lent to *anyone* - every time I do that with this title, it grows friggin’ legs.)

But there were temptations that I resisted. Like the used copy of Nancy Kress’s Beggars In Spain - which if I hadn’t found the two books above *would* have come home with me.

I also stopped by at my old local library, which still beats any of the libraries in the Bergen county area hands down. So now I’m working my way through Year Zero, by Jeff Long. Only about ten pages in, but the premise is interesting. Ahhh…. I don’t indulge my booklust nearly enough these days.

Glish has some stuff to say about frame based layout via style sheets. Huh. There was actually a w3.org working draft for this before they decided to go with CSS-P. And here I thought I was the only one thinking along these lines.

I just got the order to turn one of our client’s sites off. I don’t know why I enjoy it so much when I have to do things like this - maybe I have a latent god complex. Or maybe it’s ’cause they rank as one of our most annoying clients *ever*.

Wow - I’ve been sitting at this damn desk for too long working on one damn site revamp, and my brain and backside are numb. Even the lovely walk (Spring is *so* here - half the trees don’t have all their leaves, but it’s hitting 80 degrees.) I took on my lunch break has faded into oblivion. I have this urge to shoot rubber bands at the head of marketing and bb’s at the daughter of one of our photographers. (Yeah, bring your kids to work all you want people, but keep them *away* from me! I have too many distractions as it is.) I’ve never longed for an office before, but if I had an office, I would have a door. That I could close. Today, that is a very nice thought.

It occurs to me that I’m rhyming way too much - this may be another sign of my impending mental collapse.

Ahhh, the Ides of April… the dreaded tax day. Well, dreaded for others. My yearly tax adventure is over and done with.

Last night’s project (I felt the need to “learn by doing”) was to take all the font size specifications in my style sheets and change them to something relative and scalable, while at the same time keeping the look of the site as close to the same as possible. I think I’ve managed to do this. (Of course, if you are looking at this and it’s coming through all yucky and broken, let me know.) God only knows I don’t have the chance to make any of the stuff at work 508 compliant, I might as well prove that I can actually do it.

I don’t know what was actually harder, tracking down all the pixel specifications and figuring what was cascading into what and why everything would only work after I got *rid* of the doctypes (I have a dream of someday being able to say this all validates….); or explaining what I was doing to Bill.

It seems every weekend I have the intention of waking up early and doing something productive, but it doesn’t always pan out that way. Today I crawled out of bed around ten o’clock and discovered a beautiful spring day outside. So I thought maybe some hiking and a visit to my grandparents would be in order.

But, silly me, I forgot to check the weather report.

Halfway into the trip out, it starts raining. Hiking is now out. So I bummed around my old hometown for a few hours, found a great skirt at the local vintage clothing store, and found an out of print trilogy that I’d been looking for in the local library’s free rummage bin. Sometimes following your intuition is a good thing.

And then I visited with my grandparents, something I don’t do nearly enough of. Hell, if it weren’t for the hour and a half commute I’d have to deal with, I’d move back up there. Someday….

Something I’ve noticed about people lately…. they come to me with something that needs to be done (turn a site on/off, fix an item that’s “wrong”, make minor copy changes, etc….) but don’t have all the info I’ll need in order to effect the change. Examples: What is the actual document name of the page with the error producing product, what *specific* domain am I supposed to be screwing with (when one client has multiple domains, telling me to turn off/on “two of them” is not very helpful)

When the specific information I need is not provided, and I cannot immediately call to mind the details of the account (we’ve got over 100 clients and I do not have an eidetic memory - you do the math) I will ask questions. These questions serve two purposes. 1.) Maybe the person with the request really does know what I need, and just doesn’t understand that they have to tell me. 2.) Failing number one, maybe the answerers they do provide will jog *my* memory enough that I can complete the request. Both of these things have, at different points, happened.

However, sometimes people just do not like being questioned. The want me to snap my fingers and produce their desired results out of the ether through the magic of technology. After all, don’t I work on this stuff every day? What do you mean you can’t remember all the domains registered to a client you haven’t worked on for three months?

Hey, I’ll admit - tact and diplomacy are not my best things. I’ll make a stab at being nice and understanding, but if you aren’t going to work with me, if you do not at least try to help me do what you want me to do, then I have no use for you, and you can bugger off. I’ll attempt to complete your request anyway, and if it’s not perfect, then use your brain and give me the correct info to work with. No one is paying me money to think for you.

Norah Jones - she has a voice like Billie Holiday if Billie was alive today and singing something that fell between Jazz and Country and something else…. and she’s only 22. Did I mention that she’s also luminously beautiful?

She was interviewed on NPR this afternoon as I was driving home, and I actually pulled over so I could write her name down. Finally, a CD I can feel justified in actually *buying*.