Over the past week or two I’ve been doing some rather frantic work on my Photoshop class. I made it through the final lesson late last week, and this week, since the class ends on Friday, I decided to final tackle my Final projects. Note the multiple ‘projects’ there? If one wasn’t bad enough, they made us to two.

The first one was an inspiration in complete and utter lack of artistic talent. It was to be a montage of items, and I had to use a whole list of various techniques. I decided to do something with penguins, for lack of any other ideas, and poked around online (hooray for Google’s image search) until I managed to find enough penguin pictures to suit my needs. Then it was off to crop them and color them; to stick them all onto a lovely picture of an iceberg (well, it was lovely before I started with it, at any rate), add some little penguin footprints, and so on. I think the nicest thing I can say about that particular montage is that it is spectacular only in its sheer badness. No, you cannot see it. I think that once the class is over I will send it merrily off to the trash bin on my computer and do a silent little dance of joy when I hit the 'delete forever' key. I sent it off earlier this week and have heard nothing back from the instructor at all. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but considering the class officially ends tomorrow, at this point I really don’t much care.

The second project is the one that’s been driving me nuts for months. I was to create a fake magazine layout (again, using a set number of images and techniques). I had no ideas whatsoever, until Richard – likely having simply gotten tired of my whining about the whole thing – told me he was surprised I hadn’t thought of the obvious idea already. Do a layout involving knitting and cats, he suggested. Um. Oh. Well. Yes, that would make sense. I could wonder why I wasn’t able to think of that all by myself, but we all know the answer already so let’s not even bother going there.

So that’s what I did. And for all of my worrying and all that I was convinced that I would not be able to do this, I managed to put something together that didn’t look half bad. It is not, mind you, the loveliest of creations, but every single image I used for my fake knitting store ad came from pictures I took with my own little camera (plus one the instructor provided that we had to include), and I was able to muddle through most of the list of techniques we had to use without having to look them up in Photoshop’s help files. So I guess maybe I learned something after all.

You know the best part about finshing up the second Final project? It means that for me, the class is over. Over! And now I can install the game Richard got me for Christmas that I’ve been waiting to play because I knew it would become a massive time suck, and I do not have to pretend that I am the slightest bit creative with color or images or things like that ever again. Yay!