I think I’m drowning.
Can someone lend a hand?
Can someone save me?
‘Cause I don’t think I can.
I’ve never felt more like I was drowning than I have over these past few weeks. But, this is, after all, an art and design blog, so instead of simply writing about it, I take any personal trauma and turn it into something at least resembling creativity. Of course, I have to admit, I am very tempted to write about all the stress in my head and heart. But suffice to say something I really wanted and was thrilled to finally have was harshly ripped away from me, very suddenly, and all too soon. Coping with this has been the hardest thing ever, and more than once I thought about giving up. The first 4 stages of grief and I are really getting acquainted.
Earlier today sitting around wishing I could go back in time and change things was driving me mad. So I went for a walk, trying to clear my head. It was a nice day today, and I just walked for miles. I ended up taking a few random photos along the way. Here are some of them:
For every decent photo, though, there are about 4 rejects it seems. This was one of the many I took and found particularly unimpressive:
Now, normally I’d probably have deleted it. But surfing around online (which I’ve been doing a LOT this week, just trying to keep my mind occupied) I ended up getting this idea; turn a photo of a street into an underwater scene.
After I got home from my walk and fussed around with the photos I considered worth keeping, I started messing around with the street scene. An hour or so later I ended up with that introductory image up there, the main attraction of this post.You know, there’s some sort of message in that, I think: taking a reject and turning it into a prize…
Anyway.
I toyed around with adding some kind of sea life, or maybe a diver. But I’m not an experienced photo-editer, so I decided against it here for fear I’d really mess it up. I didn’t want to leave it totally empty though, so I searched around online for quotes or song lyrics about water or drowning. I stumbled upon “Drowning (Face Down)” by Saving Abel. I’d never heard this song before, but it fit with me and with what I was feeling for this image. (Incidentally, I have not stopped listening to it for an hour now.) I feel sheepish about the fact that I basically just plopped the words in there, but I think they work okay.
I don’t do photo manipulations much, so this was a nice project to play with. I’d like to get brave and try adding some other elements into this kind of water fantasy scene in the future. I had been working on the long-awaited yeti pattern and story, but now, because I’d been messing with it during these awful weeks of stress and upset, the whole project is sadly crawling with unhappy memories. I’ve had to push it aside, at least for now. Actually, I’m thinking it’ll probably be therapeutic, frogging it and just starting over. In fact, why not? There’s a lot of things I have to start over now anyway.
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