A couple more digital constructions using my "clumsy guitar" drawings. I'm finding that one quite satisfying way to do this is to use photographs all taken on the same day in the same place. For example, the one at the top memorialises a snowy February day in 2009, wandering in the Oxford Botanical Garden. If nothing else, having a ready-made unity of light and subject matter -- not to mention having the same image size and resolution using files from the same camera -- eases the work of layering and blending.
By contrast, the second one brings together image files from widely different occasions and cameras. A lot more effort was required to unify the whole, but in the end only I need to know that was the case. As someone once said, no-one cares how hard you worked. What matters is the result.
Why the guitars? Perhaps because, like so many of my generation, for most of my life I've been a guitar noodler. As a left-hander who self-taught on a cheap instrument borrowed from a friend, I have terrible technique, not least because I play upside-down i.e. holding a guitar conventionally-strung for a right-hander in the left-handed orientation. This has taken its toll, and a year ago I realised I was developing arthritis in certain fingers, and a variety of tennis-elbow in my right arm. Well, as the doctor says in the old joke, if it hurts when you do that, then you should probably stop doing it. So I did. I was never that good, but I do miss the sensations of playing, in the same way I missed the sensations of rolling and smoking a cigarette. It'll pass.
N.B. I'm away for a few days over the Bank Holiday. I'll schedule a post or two to keep things ticking over, but I'll be back mid-week.
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