♦Welcome to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop!♦
Topic #523
How many of your own graphics do you do?
Does anyone help you with them?
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If you’ve spent any time looking around my website, you’ll see that I have a section on Art. My studies focused mainly on history and literature. Then later, I put my full focus on film and screenwriting. Art was a study I very much enjoyed throughout my earlier schooling, but did not pursue at the college level. This wasn’t because I didn’t want to, but because I had thought I could manage my future with less of that and more science.
When I first went to college, I wanted to gain a biology degree, but after two years switched to English and history. As much as I loved my bio studies, I absolutely despised the math portion. I still don’t believe that students looking to have a degree for animal care should be pursuing calculus over psychology or even sociology. Regardless, I made the change and never looked back.
Art is something i managed on my own post secondary education. In junior high school, I created a poster for the art teacher’s door. She was very much impressed by my freehand lettering skills and wanted something nice to mark our classroom. I obliged happily. The picture is still firmly in my brain!
You can find a lot of my work on KWilliamsPhoto.devianArt.com and at ZoDuck.deviantArt.com. I also created the graphics for my first website and my writer devinatArt account. Creating graphics has been part of what I do since I started putting my work out to the public. There are a few tools I’ve used along the way: early on working with paintbrush, then adobe photoshop, Canva, and gimp. Graphic artists I know and work with have said I have a good eye for someone who is untrained, so I just proceed.
Photoshop was provided me with a powerful tool to create all kinds of digital art. The addition of Canva allowed me the means to turn those art pieces into promotional pieces focused specifically on my work. It took me out of just having a book cover or other limited imagery. Now, we have access to AI, that can rapidly produce an image for such uses, shrinking the time it would take to photo-manipulate or draw work. For storyboarding and social media promos, that’s quite a leap forward.
I don’t like to use AI, however. It’s floating in a problematic space that is beyond variants on collage and into the realm of a serious environmental and social issue. Corporations would love nothing more than to leap forward like this and skip writers and artists, even if it is shoddy work. They want to reap the profits and pay no one. They also do not care if it affects the environment–robbing the world of fresh water and eating up energy like a parasite. Profits matter more.
I have used AI to create images around my books, feeding it my writing and art to obtain and optimal result. It still falls short, although it’s better at it than I am with my limited skillset. I couldn’t afford an artist if I wanted, so I’m not stealing profits I couldn’t give anyway. And, I’m using a lot of my own copywritten stuff to accomplish the goal. In the end, I have decided it’s not for me. I’ll likely return to photo-manipulation on Gimp and Canva.
All of that said, I don’t have anything new to promote. I spend most of my time working to pay the bills and raising my daughter. We shall see what the future brings. The recent years, I have been creating more ZoDuck art and have painted. This brings me a lot of enjoyment when I can fit it in, but also frustration because it is so hard to find the time.
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I took a few art classes in high school, and spent a lot of time in needle arts through my life, but did nothing an the area of graphic arts. I feel helpless when it comes to doing anything with Canva.
I love that duck! I was never much of an artist and never encouraged at school. I do like messing around in Canva, but that’s limited to using clipart and pictures (Non-AI) to make covers and graphics.
Thank you! Check her out on deviantArt and the cafe press links, if you want a print. I am not sure if my gallery is up to date with a store still. I had let that go a minute.