"Reverse 2"

My friend Phil read my last post and suggested I ghost a picture of myself over the old photo of my great great grandmother. That sounded like a much better idea than the more practical thing I was working on in Illustrator, so I dumped that project for now and followed his suggestion.

Eerie.

I know I made the comment that our faces aren't new, but I really hadn't realized how much Lizzy and I look alike. It was easy to line up the ghosted image of my face over hers because the placement of our features are in the same places. Our chins, mouths, foreheads, ears are all the same. Yeah, creepy! Good thing so many people said so many good things about her when she was alive!

She obviously had better clothes and a better hairstyle than me though, so I made a composite to imagine living in Victorian times.

This was kind of fun even though it did freak me out a bit. Maybe everyone else should do this with pictures of their ancestors?

"Equipment"

"Is there such a thing as a bad inspiration?" I asked the question, then thought about the answer.

My brother came over Friday, right after I got IF's word of the week. He did his laundry and doodled lovely imaginations while I made a lame attempt to create a printed circuit board for my concept of "equipment".

I told Brian about my complete ignorance of what makes a computer go, while assuring him it was my most important piece of equipment. I printed out a reference photo of a circuit board, and he explained the parts as best he remembered from a job he held for a week 10 years ago. Transistor, battery, capacitor...

I said I didn't have a clue about any of it, and preferred to think of it all as a network of roads for mice to run around on. I said maybe I should come up with another idea, and he asked the critical question, "Maybe it was a bad inspiration?"

Is there such a thing as a bad inspiration? I have to doubt it. Bad ideas maybe, but not a bad inspiration. If the circuit board idea wasn't working out, maybe I wasn't following the inspiration properly. Regroup, rethink, start over...

Brian eventually went home with clean clothes, and I pondered his doodles. He specifically told me I could not put them on this blog, or I'd let you ponder them too. I figured he had the right idea and watched tv while making my own doodles. It was a pleasant way to spend the evening, far better than trying to beat an imaginary circuit board into submission.

Over the weekend I took various watercolor parts that I made when Brian was over, scanned them, cut them up, and put them together again in PhotoShop -- which all sounds pretty simple, but I seemed determined to do everything the hard way this week. In the end, I just wanted to look at some pretty colors in a pleasant design.

After all, there's no such thing as a bad inspiration!