Black and White

I like to work in black and white. There’s something spare and honest about it. But spending all day working on my book makes me long for a burst of color.
Most of what I’ve been doing lately in PhotoShop is planning and executing layouts for my book. It’s a challenge to make the illustrations fit the words, and vice versa. For example, I needed some pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to go in one section. Scanning and altering them would have taken a lot of time, so I decided to download a jigsaw puzzle program from a PhotoShop site, and see if I could do it that way.
Normally I don’t learn things quickly, and I was taken aback when I discovered that I had to use Actions. What are Actions? Darned if I know. But because I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants with PhotoShop for several years now, I figured I could probably fake it. And I was right. Actually, by “faking it,” I really mean doing it even though you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s liberating.