The first hints of fall are upon us and though that tends to be the harbinger of heating bills, it also means the coming of Halloween! YAY!

Over the past few days my love of Halloween and anatomy has driven me to invest time and effort with playing with coloring in vintage anatomy diagrams in Gimp. I find it calming and it makes my love of anatomy illustrations happy.

A little backstory, a bit off topic, but it is ultimately the reason for the start of this website and my time being free to focus on more artistic projects was the loss of another hobby. I was a video game streamer, which I had to put on hold for Covid house rearranging. (My streaming space had to become my work from home space.) Unable to stream, I replaced that hobby with trying to set up a sanctuary for people like me. Whether a hobbyist or starting a side gig, or an artist trying to share their works. Like video game playing, I find things more fun when they can be done in a social way.

ANYWAY, these photo manipulations are the sorts of things I enjoyed twenty years ago, when I could afford Photoshop, but budget and time constraints had put digital art on hold for about a decade, now I’m rediscovering my love of photo manipulation in Gimp. I had originally downloaded Gimp, last year, as a way to create a few images for my old streaming channel. With no end of isolation in sight, I’ve had to make longish term plans to migrate rooms around to allow for streaming again, this time the streaming is likely to be more art in nature as opposed to playing video games, it could be a mix. Who knows?

My free time is all spent working on this multifaceted, dynamic hobby. I’m creating layers, painting, blending, cropping, changing opacity, and finding my happy place for free. These images have been deconstructed and made into layers, then I colored the layer behind the overlay created from the original outline of the image. I blended and made adjustments until I was happy with the effect. I then annoy all of my friends with the image adjustments I made. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it excites me.

This resurgence of passion for art has me branching off into eCommerce, website creation, and reading/watching all things marketing; all of which have expanded my hobby into what feels like an adventure. However, I don’t have an adventure budget, so this entire process focuses on keeping costs low and learning how to do things I had never considered.

This hobby has evolved into brainstorming outlets for my creativity that were low or no cost and it occurred to me that I wasn’t alone in trying to do art on a shoestring, so here I am, researching and learning and hoping to share that with a community of like-minded people. Soothing my anxiety by playing in Gimp to make works for my Redbubble store and loving every minute of the process. Both Gimp and Redbubble are entirely free.

Want to dip a toe in a Photoshop style program for photo image enhancement, consider Gimp. If you’re looking to upload your work on products that can be printed, Redbubble is the most intuitive, user friendly option I’ve seen to date. If you’re interested in seeing what I’ve been up to, check it out here.