Photoshopping My Guitar

Once upon a time, back when I was a little childish artist, I used MS Paint to painfully crop out an image of my guitar. That day is long gone, and the data with it.
Luckily, the photo still survived... so...
I went and PSed it. Isn't it wonderful?
I have my guitar at my disposal for anything I want to do with it.
Problem is, I'm not entirely sure what I want to do.
There's a mountain of potential, and I want to make use of it.

I've already played around with making custom brushes - I can make a million different colors and sizes and shapes of guitar randomly... I was being silly with that...

I'm just not 100% sure what my next piece of art will involve, and I don't know how to incorporate it. I'll have to think...

I can use just the outline for an abstract concept piece, and maybe warp it. Who knows...

Anyways, that's the latest project. I made a random monkey brush for my brother Bradley. He's a monkey nut. It's rather creepy to generate an possibly infinite number of smiling monkey faces.

I have two new brushes as of today... I wonder what I'll do next... I don't have anything big on the agenda. I still suck at typography, but I'm getting better... I may do some neat vector thing if I can find an inspiration.

I'm still trying to decide what to do for my blog for April...

Same Old Grind

Photoshop projects get kinda hard some times...
I get in and out of it - some days I'll do lots, other times nothing comes.

The thing that worries me is I've been rather attached to my guitar, lately.
I think I'm substituting everything else for it...

I need make sure i don't leave these things behind, as far as interest goes.

I think what I'm going to do is do artwork that's guitar-related.
I'll probably take source pics of my guitar.

I have an abstract/background piece in the works already.
Next time I might have something with my guitar - I've been thinking of doing such a thing for a while, anyways - just been to lazy to get the camera out.

This one should be great. I'm excited.
Moral of the story today:
when something you want to keep doing gets boring, give it a twist!

Finding Source Photos

Photoshop without photos sounds kinda ridiculous, does it not?
Well, I don't particularly care for cutting things out. It doesn't matter whether it's with scissors, my dad's xacto knife, my pocketknife... It's really rather tedious to me.

The same thing applies to Photoshop. Whether it be a pen tool or a mask or any of the lassos, I don't particularly like messing with any of it. That's part of my suffering, it seems.
I found a solution that may help me to break this annoyance. I Googled it and found this on YouTube. You can get rid of whites and blacks by using the "blend if:" on the bottom in
blending options/layer styles. Alt-clicking can give you a secondary slider.

Fireworks!!! I have lots of them on my phone from July (of course). This is a neat green one I stuck on a Filter> render> clouds background. While I was in layer styles I gave it a nice outer glow. I love it! It's not a piece of art by its self, but it's an awesome proof-of-concept.

I think I'll be able to take advantage of source images hereafter. I do need to get to where I'm better at finding them or taking them - I don't really like taking pics from the internet - it comes off cliché - and you can't always prevent accidental licensing issues.