Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Creative Energies

Subduing your passions is hard.

I sometimes am easily overcome with a thought or idea and said thought or idea can consume my attention for a period of time. This was, yet again, pointed out to me by the Worshipful Master of my home (aka The Wife) who said that I was addicted to my blog. The statement came after I had yet again sat down at my computer to work on my new logo which I had been doing for about a week straight. Being a man, and a defensive one at that, I said in my oh so mature way "am not" and continued with what I was doing muttering to myself how she doesn't understand me. But, like with most admonitions, as the day passed by I saw the light and realized that I had become addicted.


I always wanted a Celtic Square and Compasses design and I had never been happy with my logo that I started the blog with. I had created it for my lodges first annual St. Patrick's Day Feast and it was my first attempt at a computer graphic. While at the time it did the job, it never lived up to the vision I had in my head and to top things off no one knew that the symbol in the middle was a G in Gaelic font. As my knowledge of the computer grew exponentially with my blog experience I longed for a better header for my blog. (I am so narcissistic)




My logo took an sharp upward jump after a conversation with my good friend, who I have mentioned a couple of times in my posts who is a graphic artist. He, after reading my blog too long and getting in trouble with his wife, did a quick upgrade to my little logo. This, in turn, jump started my creative energies.


The next evolution began with a pencil drawing session with my 4 year old daughter. While she was drawing a beautiful stick figure portrait of our newly bigger family, I came up with the overall outline of what I wanted on one of her 5x5 inch scraps of paper. She saw what I was drawing and said "Daddy you re drawing your lodge", which made me smile. I have brought her a couple of time to the lodge with me and she loves "the lodge guys".


I took that outline and moved on to my computer and the new graphic design program I purchased. As with most things that I take up, I jumped in head first not knowing a thing about what I was doing. I did manage somehow to point, drag, and click my way to a halfway decent outline of compasses which I proudly showed my friend during our long overdue old fashioned B.S. session. He then, with much wizardry, showed me more things in a couple of minutes than I had learned in the entire week I had been frustratingly playing around with the program. The creative flame was now fanned to the point of combustion.


I spent the next week, at any possible moment I could, furiously creating. Sometimes with a four year old climbing all over me, sometimes with a four week old squirming or sleeping in my arms. The result is the new header logo for my blog. If you dropped in on my blog before last night it was way too huge, because I couldn't figure out how to make it smaller. After some help from "webfixer" from the blogger help group and my good friend who tweaked my design I am now happy with my logo. Well not completely because being a perfectionist I will never be completely happy but I am light years from where I was.


As I told my wife later, after admitting my addiction which is the first step towards recovery, at least my addiction is leading towards creative things. Right?

1 comment:

Traveling Man said...

Brother:

I have drawn several Celtic designs - some of which have won trophies at local feis. I have also done them for a friend who had it embroidered on her daughter's step dancing dress.

Once things slow down a bit, I could either attempt a design for you, or teach you how to draw the knotwork by hand.

TM