coyleart

digital toolbox

It's nice to have a man around the house, particularly one who's handy - and lucky for me, Clayton is not only good with power tools, but he's a whiz at all things digital, including Photoshop. He often sends me tips he finds online to help me in my quest to learn that crazy program. Right now, I'm helping a friend with her new CD cover - I'll show you later - and we're doing a little beauty retouching to the photographs taken by Atlanta photographer Greg Ponder.

©Greg Ponder
The above photo is one of his, no retouching needed here, but it's just a sample of the beautiful work that will be showcased on this CD package. Clayton found some great resources for me on beauty retouching - I watched this tutorial over at Layers magazine and learned some great tips to add to my arsenal.

I was also exploring how to make halftone dot patterns from photographs that I could use for screen printing - and I learned some tricks I can re-purpose for my needs in this tutorial

Then Clayton sent me another interesting tidbit. According to CreativeTechs there's a new autotrace tool that even outdoes Adobe Illustrator's built-in Live Trace feature, and it's free! I haven't had the time to check it out for myself, and I've got Live Trace tweaked to my satisfaction, but I'll be interested to give this a whirl at some point.

And back to photography - somewhere out there on the horizon, I see a new lens in my future (for my Nikon D70). We've been debating it for awhile, but are decided on one thing, we want a 50mm. (still deciding on the 1.4 vs. the 1.8) Here's a persuasive article titled "Ditch That Zoom for a Classic 50mm" that got us started on the subject. I'm ready for a little bokeh in my life after looking at the Greg Ponder photo above.

happy happy happy new year

Well, I'm back finally after a great holiday ski trip and then a good week and a half of crunch-time, meeting lots of deadlines that were on hold while I was away. I am excited about what this new year will bring. Today Kiki (my rep) and I are sending out our latest e-promo, take a look:

©Laura Coyle 2008

If you would like to receive my e-promos, drop me a line and I will add you to my list. These little e-postcards go out about every month-or-so.

And on the subject of happy new year, I notice the word 'happiness' popping up a lot, as people talk about their new year resolutions: how to be happy, cultivate happiness, why we get so busy we forget what truly makes us happy. I recently watched this interesting talk on TED, with a Buddhist monk/author/photographer, Matthieu Ricard discussing the "habits of happiness."

Then I saw an episode of 20/20 that reported on neuroscientists studying a community of Tibetan monks, who they describe as "olympians of meditation," by studying their brain waves in a quest to understand their happiness tendencies. The report also ranked countries by happiness level: Denmark is apparently the happiest country in the world, and surprisingly Italy was shown to be the least happy country in all of western Europe. Hmmm. It didn't quite make sense to me at first, but you can follow link to the episode above to find out more.

One recurring theme that was reported to affect happiness is the balance between how secure a person feels, and how much control they have over their own situation. Which reminds me in my career as a freelance illustrator (and now part-time musician) I have all the control and freedom I could ever want, and I gain a lot of happiness from that. On the flip side, the roller-coaster nature of owning your own business sometimes makes the feeling of a warm security blanket a little harder to come by. Somehow it all balances out - there are days when I long for a more circumscribed path, a nice benefits package, a steady job - but the adventure of my "job" and the fact that it's all mine is what I love about it - and that gives me a whole lot to smile about. At least this week, that is! (ah...and there's the elusive nature of happiness for you) Here's to a (mostly) happy 2008!