Demon Head Smoking 2015

I use Adobe Photoshop on a daily basis, but that's not to say I'm any good at it.  I've taken lots of classes, but the problem is that, if you don't use what you've learned, POOF, it's gone, or at least gone from my very right brained mind .An instructor of mine compared PS to a very big, complex city, but that the only way to learn to get about in that city is to learn your immediate neighborhood, and go from there.  My PS neighborhood is about one block square and I only go out to the corner store for eggs, milk, and bread. With this in mind, in 2015, I went about trying to make my neighborhood a little bigger.  I started making images in Photoshop, in the computer, not painting, cutting and pasting onto panels as I'd always done.  The learning curve was huge, and my neck and shoulders would be frozen by the end of a four hour or longer work period.  I "drew" with my mouse, which is like drawing with a bar of soap, and at the same time learned about these magical "brushes" that would make strange and fabulous marks.  I had to learn to use layers, and not to forget which layer I was on as I stumbled along.  The one thing that was the same was the use of my photos.  I would always start these images with a photograph underneath, and then, just as always, I would use the interaction of photoshop and the under lying photo to build the image.  These images live in the computer, and when they exist outside of the computer, they are seen as archival pigment prints, with small edition sizes.  I stopped doing them because the world didn't seem very interested, but I do love them--quirky, strange--a wonderful combination of skill and blunder.