I am working on more stories, and with that comes creating the images that go with them. I collect copyright free images from different websites, then adjust or splice images until it matches what I want to convey with my story.
It’s so cool to read a story, see a picture in my mind, and re-create that picture in Photoshop or GIMP. I think it adds a certain appeal to the story, having both visual and mental images align for further impact.
This week I made a couple images in my spare time—nothing too fancy. I tend to do rough draft images and come back to them a week or so later to match up with my story.
Sometimes I find images where I can see potential to just mess around with, and those usually get used for social media postings for my writing.
There are bugs in those programs though. I discovered a few months ago that when you convert the image RGB color profile to GIMP that sometimes the changes don’t save since the GIMP RGB profile isn’t exported with the picture (I didn’t know what was going on there—took me two hours to research and play around with it until I discovered that little tidbit). For Photoshop, sometimes the tools randomly stop working, and when that started, I thought it was an old graphics card, so I replaced that and they still randomly stopped working. I also re-installed the program.
Recently I got all the kinks worked out in the Photoshop program, and have switched all my picture editing to that program. GIMP is awesome because it is free, but it was maddening to know that my creations wouldn’t save correctly on the computer for me to use. So now I just use it occasionally for social media posts in addition to other programs.
My latest project is something different for me. Since I post a lot of motivational stuff, and I like to motivate people in general, I have decided to work on a motivation book with a nice twist (to be announced at a later date).
I’m still working to see if this is doable (and not come off as too fake looking with the images), but I’ve got some pretty good ones made so far, and it makes me happy working with the images (so a win for everyone).
I’ve got a rough draft of the writing done, and have a lot of editing to do. The big part is the pictures, which take a lot of time to create. I thought about using the National Writing Month to get it done, and unofficially I have set that goal.
What are you working on this month?