Margin Doodles No. 24

These doodles were drawn on the other side of the page containing last week's doodles. The poor notebook paper was thoroughly defeated by my quad-colored ball-point pen: there was a lot of bleed-through, and even with judicious Photoshop manipulation I had a hard time getting clean images.

Which is a shame, because this first one has to be one of my all-time favorite doodles. It's a complete non-sequetur; I don't know what inspired it.

Not so the next doodle on the page. This is a cryptic tribute to two guys I had crushes on at the time. I used math symbols for my crush code names: does it get any geekier than that?

Illustrated Tweets: @benrobbins, @hurriednotes

Photo collage: "Becalmed"

It's already August, but I've been looking at my July photo collage for a couple of weeks, even though I haven't written about it yet. It's set as the desktop background on my extra monitor. I found having the picture next to me all day, within my line of sight, helped get me over creative roadblocks I had during its construction.

This post was supposed to be about each of those roadblocks and what I did to take the collage ever closer to the finished piece at each stage. I was going to show what the picture looked like at each of those stages.

Alas, at some point I saved the newer version of the file (July2012_Becalmed_simplified.psd) over the top of the original file (July2012_Becalmed.psd). Now all I have is the minified photoshop file without all the messy unused layers that show how I built all the pieces. I feel like all my effort has been lost somehow, even though I have a final image that I'm quite happy with.

I did manage to salvage one older iteration of the collage, without the wavy lines. But the older versions, with the single-color "jellyfish" and the wider stripes, are lost. Maybe I need to start using Subversion for my photo collages.

So here it is, "Becalmed," built from a picture of Harper's Ferry, WV by Eoghann Irving, a photo of some luminescent jellyfish at the New England Aquarium by Seth Pipkin, and a picture of the sea off the south coast of England by Richard Leeming.

The final version of the collage.

Second-to-last iteration: I decided it needed more movement and waviness.