Taste Crisis

I feel like I'm in the middle of a 'taste' crisis. I browse the digital scrapbook stores, seeing varying styles and none really seem to appeal at the moment. Not enough to buy any which is good for my pocket book for awhile. 

I look at my friends art, totally enamored with some yet not knowing how to begin to do something similar.

I'm feeling very unsettled. Perhaps I should be out working in the garden...

Today I cleaned the desktop of my iMac. I've always created a folder on the desktop titled "Desk cleaned (date)". My current folder was titled Feb 2016. Inside it was various files plus a folder titled Desk Sept. Inside that was another titled On My Desk July. Inside that was another for May 2015. Besides all these folders a ton of files or photos were randomly scattered throughout. 

They haven't all disappeared but I threw a ton of stuff in the trash and backed up others. Right now those folders are still there but I think I'll put them all in one called To Put Away and save that for another day.  (This is to say nothing about the stuff stacked up in my Downloads folder.) Can anyone relate?

I am proud to say that as I cleaned my current desktop off, nothing was added to that folder.

It was nice to look back at some old work with new eyes, even back to 2009 (not sure why some of those things were there.) And I sure looked a lot younger 5 years ago. 

This was a try out of Picsart on my iPad.

It will add layers but not show them for editing after the effect is applied. Sort of similar to iColorama. I'll be exploring it more.

Mobile Art Monday No. 7

Today's featured app is PicsArt. (Also available for Android) And it's free. 

It was a little confusing at first because it is an "Instagram wanna be" app. In other words it is also a social media community, that is, if you want to join. 

So you may see this screen pop up first, go ahead and go straight to the pencil (edit) tool at the center bottom to pull up the menu shown in the image on the right.

At this point, I used Superimpose to layer a more contrasty version of the original over the top of this PicsArt version using a blend mode so the trees would have more definition and have an over all lighter appearance.

(I know I did a few more edits on this but can't remember what.)

I felt like the trees were just begging for someone to walk among them, so I added an extraction of my niece in Superimpose. I merged the layers, saved to camera roll and re-imported the image as a new foreground to get the multiple effect version you see at the beginning of this post.

Have you tried out any new apps lately? I tend to stick to my tried and true if you haven't noticed. But this app has a lot of potential so I intend to investigate further.