'Just how many sets of brakes have you gone through?' asked a friend the other night, as I was driving back from dinner.
'Um… only three. Why?'
He just sighed, muttering something that sounded suspiciously like 'You MINI drivers.'
Interestingly enough, The Fabulous Lorraine said exactly the same thing about my driving a couple of years ago, when I picked her up from LAX. Apparently her Boss, also a MINI owner, drives like I do. I told her I was simply battle-hardened from driving in Los Angeles all my life. She did not believe me. Not even showing her my Safe Driver certificate from the DMV was enough to convince her that I could be let on the road without causing great bodily harm to my fellow Angeleños. You swerve out of the way of one semi, and you get branded a bad driver. (Okay, I swerved at 75 m.p.h. on the tight curve of the 110-101 interchange, but that's what MINIs are born to do!)
Sigh.
After seeing this MINI commercial, I now must grudgingly admit my friends are right about my driving.
Many graphic designers spent time in the trenches doing pixelmonkey work: retouching and color correcting photos. Back in the mid-'90s, Photoshop didn't have all the auto-correct, healing-brush, no-thought-required tools that it now does. I have spent more hours than I care to think about, alone in a room, staring at an image blown up to 1600%, altering an image pixel-by-pixel. I've laboriously masked out backgrounds from hair, hidden bald spots, removed people from group photos, and performed other pixelmonkey feats. I can pretty much repaint, add, or remove… well, anything from an image. This has made me extremely good at spotting when something's been badly retouched.
This means I'm often asked to judge whether or not an image has been Photoshopped. Now Lifehacker's put together a handy guide to detecting image manipulation yourself. See? You don't need me anymore!
I feel that retouching isn't always a bad thing. I believe there's no harm in taking out something from a photo that isn't normally there: e.g., spinach in someone's teeth, a cold sore, a pimple. Color correcting a shot because it was shot with the wrong white balance? Fixing exposure or focus issues? No problem. I consider that to be a reasonable use of Photoshop.
I highly doubt that anyone could manage to alter their body shape as drastically as that video above would have you believe, but it's a good illustration of just how much you can do with Photoshop, if you know what you're doing. I'm against that kind of major surgery, because it gives a very false impression of what most people look like… not to mention the unrealistic and unattainable ideals of beauty our culture holds women to. As Jessica Coen points out in Jezebel,
"For those of you who have seen, time and time again, these manipulated images — be it a retouched wrinkle or a dramatically trimmed waistline — and are aware of the reality behind them, you're maybe able to look at ads and mags and keep your head straight. Not necessarily, but that's the hope.
But remember that every day, a young woman somewhere sees one of these overly polished pictures for the first time…and has no idea that they're not real. She may very well have no idea that most waists don't really bend without a roll of flesh, that a 40-year-old woman actually does have some wrinkles, that no mascara will make one's lashes magically long enough to tickle her eyebrows. What the girl does know is that the pictures show What Is Beautiful. She thinks they are reality. And maybe she doesn't have someone in her life to point out that this is complete and utter bullshit."
I know it's bullshit, because I've had to alter images, and see the before-and-after shots. I know what to look for. Now, hopefully, you've got the tools to detect the Photoshoppery, too.
Faber-Castell pencils are my favorites. I once had a set of four pitch-black pencils, with silver-capped ends. Those pencils gave such a rich black, it was astounding; so unlike those crap No.2 pencils I was plagued with in school. I've been looking for replacements for years, but been unable to find them. Until now:
It's called 'The Perfect Pencil,' and I cannot wait to buy one. I don't know that I strictly need the platinum-plated pencil extender/sharpener version. But ooh, I want one. And once I have them, I will not stick them up my nose, like Blackadder's doing above. Not even if I do want to be considered insane to get out of being sent to the front.
I've been kicking around the idea of redesigning pantagruel.net -- by doing the entire thing with Drupal.
You know how some people, in the face of impending deadlines, suddenly decide that they've just got to vacuum the baffles on the fridge right this very second? And then they have to scrub their floors with a toothbrush? (That is, people-who-are-not-my-mother. She does that kind of crazy housekeeping all the time. FOR FUN.) Not having inherited that level of cleanliness, this is my version: making an already complicated schedule even more complicated, by piling another extremely labor-intensive project onto the list of things I'm supposed to be doing.
That kind of procrastination is a sign I have a painting at a stage I hate. I become convinced that surely an epileptic six-year-old could do better, and I should just light the entire home studio on fire, so there was never any evidence of my failed attempts.
And they wonder why there's never any early work from most Old Masters.
