love: graphic design?

A post about the people, places, and inspiration I love.

So as I have mentioned before, I am obsessed with blogs. I spend nearly an hour everyday just going through some of my favorites, soaking up inspiration. Yesterday, my boyfriend called me out on a few things that are wrong with this though. First, I’m being selfish with this hour of my day by absorbing inspiration but not giving anything back. To quote The Great Gatsby (the movie, not the book), I contributed nothing.

Secondly, I spend so much time admiring the work of these people, drooling over their custom fonts, envying them their graphic design skills, dreaming of their beautiful gardens, and wishing I could be like them, but if someone were to ask me why I didn’t strive to obtain those things as well, I would laugh at them. Of course I can’t do those things! I’m not awesome like that. I’m just me. So I continued to look at other peoples’ abilities as though they were completely unattainable, all the while wasting precious time I could be spending working toward those skill sets.

Well, no more.

Zach finally called me out, and so here I am, showing you the work of my yesterday. I spent maybe four hours watching tutorials on pixelmator (a PhotoShop knockoff, because let’s be real, who can actually afford PhotoShop to support a day-old hobby? not this girl) and trying to create… something. The results were a few images that I’m not exactly proud of, but thought I’d share anyway, because hopefully they can be the BEFORE pictures to go with my some-day-in-the-distant-future AFTER pictures. We’ll see. Either way, here they are!

Above is my first attempt to take something from paper to computer. Yes, I agree, not good. But I just wanted to prove that I actually did make SOME progress during the four hours I spent on this yesterday.

Zach helped me with this one. I drew the elephant design, and he helped with the transferring process from paper to computer. I can’t claim this one as completely my own, but I will admit to squealing like a little girl when I saw MY drawing on MY computer. Call me naive, call me old-fashioned, but this is awesome!

Then I saw this tutorial about adding light leaks to pictures and went a little cray cray. Why yes, this is now my profile picture, and I don’t even care that it is so obviously edited. It reminds me of the first time my mom let me buy a disposable camera, and every picture looked like this. Good times, friends. Good times.

My last attempt of the day looked way too much like something on observando, but I didn’t care even slightly. I’m obsessed with that site, so it makes me happy.

Well, now that you’ve seen my first attempts, don’t judge. This is day one. I’m new and intimidated by it all (who even really knows what selection tools and magic wands are anyway? still don’t really know how to use them…), but I’m excited! I had even considered not telling anyone that I was working at this, and then amaze everyone with my awesomeness after I had worked on it for a while, but that lasted all of twelve hours. Guys, I even made a secret pinterest board of graphic design stuff so that no one would know what I was doing. Ridiculous. All that to say, thanks for looking at what I have so far!

PS: I mentioned the blogs I follow like 18 times in this post, so no worries. I’ll put up a post about my favorites soon!