An interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed in my 5th decade of life. When I revisit some thang I struggled to learn the first 50 times, when I start it over and keep at it, I am able to push through and make artistic things happen after a long, long drought. So, it’s a small miracle for me that I not only got up early on a Sunday and out the door with my camera. I then walked around downtown Titusville, Florida for an hour as the sun was rising and got reacquainted with the sights and sounds of nature in the morning.
And thanks to my job and my manager’s encouragement to learn new things, I am really picking things up at a fast rate now. Every day, I am getting better in Canva. Today I found myself wanting to design a wallpaper for my desktop. Normally I would have turned to Photoshop to do the job, but instead I uploaded my photos into Canva and made this:
And it was so much fun to make! My favorite places, my favorite people. I love that I can pull in all these elements and put everything together so quickly. And when I needed the silhouettes of my beloved dogs running to mama, well I just asked Canva AI to make them. And as I was working, the Canva AI prompt denied my request saying that too many people were using Light Room at that moment. I waited a nanosecond and asked again.
Another big deal for my life right now is that I read MASTERING TYPE by Denise Bosler, cover to cover and discovered the power of grids. Canva easily allows you to place in a grid and it has been what I was missing as a designer. Now I make much better decisions about grouping elements. Before I was just intuitively designing and it was much more hit or miss.