Playing in the whitebox

I finally got some decent lighting a couple of weeks ago. Not great lighting, but decent. There's a lot to be said for natural light. And awesome photo editing software. An artist can't rest simply on her laurels, now can she?

Here are some of the results:

I spent the better part of tonight deep in iPod-land desperately trying to cobble together more sentences for the book I'm working on. When the muse clearly was busy elsewhere, I decided it was time to do some photo editing instead. While I'm not 100% thrilled with what I captured that evening, I'm glad I'm getting back into the groove with the photography again.

I've come to realize that my art is a holistic thing; it requires both typical tools of the artistic trade and photographs. When my pool of photos is running thin, I have to revisit the ones I'd previously discarded as not good enough. Often I find treasures in there -- things that won't stand on their own merit, but are otherwise excellent fodder for some mixed media work.

The only thing I'm really lacking these days is time. There are simply not enough hours in a day and in my week to get everything I want to do done. I keep trying to figure out how to make it all work, but there really is no such thing as having your cake and eating it, too. That frustrates the hell out of me, because I don't like being thwarted. Because, dammit, I have dreams. Big ones. Living, breathing, dynamic visions of what I want my more immediate future to look like -- and it has nothing to do with dragging my ass out of bed so I can drag it into a corporate job.

Which is why I have to have my cake and eat it -- swallow great big gobs of it. Because dreams this big won't wait to come true. I have to ride this for all its worth. I've got the support and love of a good man, trolls who already believe I'm an artist and don't understand why I'm not an art teacher. I've got the gumption, the vision and the relative know-how. Now all I need is time -- and a bit more money in the bank.