You Don't Win Friends With Salad (Patreon)

One of the things I need to learn more than anything is when to quit. There are times when I muscle past all the obstacles and end up with something amazing. And then there are times when I muscle past all the obstacles and just end up in a fucking mess. It's not as catchy, but I probably would have been better served by being obsessed with a children's movie with the motto "Goonies sometimes say 'die' and that's fine."

I'm not sure if this is an actual skill you can use, or just a result of becoming familiar with the limitations of whatever you're working with. When I designed the sets and costumes for Macbeth, I had some BIG ideas and a SMALL budget. I put an insane amount of work into that show, and got an immeasurable amount of last minute help from my parents but some things just didn't work. And I will forever be grateful to the practical techie hidden somewhere in my psyche that came to the forefront during tech week and mercilessly said "That won't work. Cut it." over and over again. I think it may have scared the director and producer a little, since they'd spent the last few months seeing me fight tooth and nail for "MY ARRRRRT." But, whatever. They needed to be frightened by a woman.

Which brings me to this photoshopping project.

I had an idea, I did a selfie shoot. It was.....close to what I wanted, but not quite. I couldn't actually get the jacket to close, hence the weird hand position. I figured I could crop them out, but I ended up really liking the tapered shape my body made and the *idea* of how the live of that collar would look, coming to a point right below the belly button. So I thought I could maybe just make it work in photoshop. It was supposed to be surreal, so maybe she didn't need hands at all. And the stuff I did to cover them *kinda* worked and maybe if I just put a texture over everything later.... Then I realized that the resolution wasn't really high enough. But I'd already done so much work on this and...and...and. I think when my brain starts to say "It's just a little airborn, it's still good. It's still good!" I am probably trying a bit too hard to make something work.

And that's good! Photoshop has limits and I'm learning what they are! And, now that I know what doesn't work about the original image, I would actually *save* time by simply reshooting the original.

I don't like that it took me this long to figure this out but yay for learning.