This will be the index file for my website to hold my work for the LVSOnline course "Photoshop — Starting with a Blank Canvas" taught by myJanee.
I have followed her work for about five years now, ever since I checked a link in a Usenet newsgroup during a dull period at work. Work is now anything but dull, but I've continued to check her site. In January of this year, I noticed that she was teaching an LVSOnline course. I tried to register for it, but registration for that course wasn't available until April 12. So, on April 12, I registered for the course.
I'm a 58-year-old man who's alternated between careers in technical communication and programming for the last 25 years. Prior to that I had careers in (chronological order) statistical analysis, music, and newspaper reporting and editing. It's been an interesting life and continues to be so.
Back in 1988 or 89, I attended a workshop put on by Apple Computer at which they showed a program called Photoshop. I think it was version 2 dot something, but I'm not really sure. I was working at the New York State Education Department, where my unofficial job was "blue sky boy." I was given all kinds of neat toys to play with and had to evaluate what potential they had for classroom use. It was a nasty job, but somebody had to do it. Every month or so, I was called upon to develop presentation materials for various executives to use in their reports to the Board of Regents. It seemed to me that Photoshop might be useful in that work, so I convinced them to spring for the purchase price. (This was back before PowerPoint became the accepted term for "electronic presentation"; in fact, this was before PowerPoint. We were using a program from Aldus — remember Aldus? — called Persuasion.) Anyway, they bought the program, then the update, then (I think) another update. Then there was a change in governors, commissioners, assistant commissioners, etc. and they didn't want to buy any more updates. I approached my boss with the proposition that if they would transfer ownership of the license to me, I would keep up with the updates. So, for $150 I owned Photoshop 3.5. I missed v5.0 and v7.x, but now I've got CS (not 2.0), but it's the education version because my former roommate was a nursing student and I could get the whole CS package for under $500. The last time I had seen Illustrator was v1.0. I became an immediate fan of FreeHand from Aldus (remember Aldus?).
Back to Photoshop work; enough memoir writing. While at State Ed, I began to expand from presentation backgrounds to illustrations for books, to backgrounds for web pages (which this page doesn't have and probably won't), to book covers, to Photoshop courses, to music videos for my church (most of the static backgrounds were PS work; the animation and control was Director — I still don't use PowerPoint).
Because that's what I do for a living right now.
Here are the links to the lesson pages.
Because right now I'm just putting together the barebones web page. I'll have enough work to show as the course develops. I just read the intros from a couple of people in the class, and I'm having a bit of a self-image problem, as well. I'll get over it. I always do.
I've become enamored with perspective work and have actually been able to make some things which are representational.
Perspective Work is the page on which I'm putting the results of my experiments, with commentary.