You may have noticed a new banner here on ye olde bloggue; that’s because I made a new one.

Thanks again to Wikipedia and Pixabay for the source images

I created this on Photoshop, not Pixlr, and it was a bit of a trip down memory lane for me. I’ve been using Photoshop in one form or another for around 13 years–when I first used it I had obtained Photoshop 7.0 (before the CS numeration began with 8.0 or CS1). I’ve never had much traditional artistic ability, but I’ve always had technical ability and a decent enough aesthetic that Photoshop evened the playing field when I wanted to create decent artwork for class projects or for any of the shenanigans I got up to on various internet fan forums (remember, it was 2002).

As a result, creating a quick banner like this was second nature for me. Even though I haven’t opened Photoshop in about a year now (college sucks and drains all your hobbies from you like a vampire drains blood from a sunshiney white teenager), I knew where all the tools and options I needed were intuitively, from the lasso and magic wand, to the free transform and image adjustments, to the merge/create/delete layer buttons, and even layer effects like drop shadow. In all, it took me about five minutes to complete this.

As for what I struggled with: well, not much at all. I have never been very good at removing unwanted portions of a source image (i.e., the background of that fun dude doing the jive), but the background was solid black so it only took a moment of my time. If it had been an actual background, it would’ve taken me a lot longer to extract the jovial jiving dude from his surroundings.

Pushing these skills into my greater world as a life skill is actually a no-brainer for me. Being able to design graphics is a valuable asset to literally any organization, and having that skill in my arsenal makes me a more valuable member of said organization.