Challenging myself

After the struggle I've had to concentrate over the last couple of weeks, this morning while having breakfast I challenged myself to go back to an old design and re-work/change/update it and add something new to it. I scrolled through my files and picked a design at random.

The design file that I opened was Over The Hills and Far Away, this was created for Visual Communications class when I was at college away back in 2012/13. I remember the tutor had 2 bags with words in and we were to choose a word from each bag, my words were Rural and Texture. The texture was created with corrugated card which I already had a scanned file of on my pendrive, it reminded me of ploughed fields. This was, as far as I can remember a quick in class design that I created in Photoshop.

This morning the psd file was opened in Photoshop, there was no pressure on me to create anything in particular or for anyone apart from myself. I was just playing and getting those creative juices flowing again. I used all the elements that were already in the design, I changed colours and layout. then added an extra background layer, rotated it, changed colour and blending mode to give more interest to the top of the design. This done it reminded me of a sunset, so I added some sunrays. This is now the 2016 version of Over The Hills and Far Away.  I love this new version.

Which version do you prefer?

I might go back to a few of my other designs and re-do them, I feel the creative juices starting to flow again.

Over at Illustration Friday this weeks challenge is STRIPES......there's stripes in this design so I think I'll submit it :)

Struggling to concentrate...

Over the last few weeks I just haven't been able to concentrate on anything creative. I have a sketchbook full of ideas and several projects started but have just not been able to focus on completing anything!!! It's so annoying!

I also need to update my website and make it responsive as most folk are accessing the internet on their mobiles now. I read somewhere that Google is not going to list websites unless they are responsive.
What is a responsive website? I hear you ask. Well I need to create my website so that it "responds to" or resizes itself depending on the type of device it is being viewed through, ie. pc, tablet or mobile phone. I still also want to add a shopping cart to my website too, but one thing at a time as I need to have a clear totally focused head to do this lol

One thing I have managed to create over the last few weeks was a hand drawn watercolour name doodle for my great niece. Even this took weeks to do though as I kept leaving it and going back to it, but I finally finished it and gave it to my nephew and his wife. I was so pleased they loved all the wee images that I had incorporated within it that have meaning to them.

Winter is creeping up on us now and every day more and more geese are arriving at the Loch of Skene. No chance of a long lie here as Mother Natures alarm call gets me up every morning as the geese leave the Loch for the day and then return in the evening when it's time to cook dinner. I love watching them.



I had a few days away visiting family, which I totally enjoyed but now I'm home I miss everyone so much. Looking forward to my next visit though because grandchild no. 9 is due on 23rd December.

Now I better try and get some work done, hopefully stay focused on one thing and complete something :)