I have had a couple of lovely compliments recently about the photos I use to start my posts, (thank you, and blush!). But what it’s resulted in, is me sharing my photo tweaking knowledge with others. So I thought it might be useful to share that knowledge with everyone else.

If you would like to know how to make photos like mine, or ones in your own style, then read on.

Now before I start, I want to draw your attention to an awesome post by Helen. She wrote about the pitfalls of using any old photo, instead of ensuring they are copyright free or your own images. Check it out, it’s called Before You Publish.

Let me first begin adding a caveat to this post too. I always make a point of trying to find websites with copyright free images, pay for images myself, or use ones I have taken. I wrote this post of my own volition, any websites I mention are not paying me to promote them, I am sharing those that I use, find helpful or have been told are helpful. You must first check terms and conditions on all sites as they are ALL different, or else use photos at your own risk.

Right now the boring bits out the way lets talk about the fun stuff.

If you aren’t a hot-shot photographer than you are going to need a supply of photos to edit.

ONE – WHERE CAN YOU GET PHOTOS?

There are lots of paid places which cost a varying amount, I personally use Fotalia, as recommended by Ali, and I have to say it is excellent. 44 million photos or something it has, careful – you can end up wasting 45 minutes looking for a photo – which I did Sunday night looking for one for my 8 Steps to Cracking The YA Mindset. *foreheadslap*

As general points – If you are careful and use the paid ones for special posts, then the credits last ages. I have only used 4 I think of the 26 I purchased and that was only about 20 quid, and I have been using photos for ages.

PAID AND FREE PLACES – in no particular order

1. Fotalia – paid for

2. Deposit photos – paid for

3. Stockvault has a variety of images both paid for and free – Hint – Paid for ones are the ones displayed in a black background at the top and bottom of the free section which is in white!

4. Graphic Stock – paid for

5. Death to Stock Photos – free

6. Free Images has a mix of free and paid for images

7. Stocksnap – free

8. unsplash – free

9. Gratisography – free

10. Negative Space free

11. PicJumbo – free

12. New Old Stock – for vintage photos and a mix of paid for packs and some free photos

13. Creative Commons + Flicker – possibly the two most famous places to get images – creative commons is widely known as a source of copyright free images. It will link you to flicker too hence the joint point. Scroll down until you find the section that says ‘Find CC Material’ and type in your search.

If this isn’t enough  – here are two post one, post two, with 37 sites between them for a variety of free and paid for images.

TWO – CHOOSING PHOTOS

When choosing photos there are a couple of things to bear in mind.

1. If your topic is on the perils of editing, make sure you choose a photo that’s relevant – a typewriter or a book, whatever, use your imagination, but if you start posting photos of a lion eating a safari truck, or a kid sat doing a poop on the toilet people are going to think you’re a) bonkers and b) not credible. That’s not to say you can’t be abstract, but having some kind of link to what you are saying is important.

2. Which means – send a message. Use the photo to give a message in a way your writing can’t.

3. I have found myself liking a particular style of photos, for me personally, I like to stick to that style. It gives a kind of branding to your imagery. If you are consistent after a while people see a photo and instantly recognise it as yours.

THREE – BEFORE YOU EDIT

1. I have a thing for consistency. I always use the same font across all my photos, posts, business cards, you name it, if I can edit it, then it will be in the same font. Like point 3 above there is a benefit to being consistent. You build your own brand, people recognise your stuff. BUT, like all things, rules are meant to be broken. One example is this. Where I used several different fonts all in one go. The way I kept consistency was to only use three colours for the font.

2. Light and dark distribution – when you pick a photo it’s important to consider what colour text you want to over lay on it. If for example you want a dark photo to represent a horror story or a post about writing horror stories, you can’t then over lay dark text on it. See the photo – can you even read the text? Yeah, exactly!

3. Text colour options – Now we each have our own style, so don’t feel obliged to do what I am saying, you may hate my style. The important thing is you find your own style and designs. I am just sharing what I do.

I like to (although not always) pick out the colours in the photo for the text so that they blend. Hence you can see orangey yellows around the skulls and the same sort of colour for the text. But I have used completely contrasting photos and it has just as good an impact.

4. Who are you? If you have something you want to promote then you need to make sure you label it on the photo. I always include my website address and if the post is part of a series, I try to put that on there too.

5. Busy photos – be wary, busy photos can be very hard to overlay text on. Text can become lost or the colours of the text don’t show up enough to pop against the busy background.

FOUR – MAKING MAGIC

Here’s the bones of it. It kinda depends whether you have a Mac or a PC. I have a Mac, which isn’t going to help many people. But our trusty Geoffle will explain for PC users. There are three ways you can edit photos simply.

ONE – MAC USERS

You could spend money and buy software – Mac’s have the App store and a simple google will tell you the right apps. I have Photoshop and illustrator – I do use them, but most of the time I don’t. I use the very simple and basic photo viewing software ‘Preview’. That’s what it looks like. I believe ‘Paint’ in windows is of a similar ilk. If you open a photo in your Macbook it will open using preview, and look something like this:

This is where the magic happens. To get your tool bar up, which is the row of icons. You need to press the suitcase – the suitcase is usually grayed out until you click it, like so.

This then appears:

These are the icons you need to edit photos. The ‘T’ is for a text box. It appears when you click it with the words ‘text’ in it and then you can type whatever you like it in and move them wherever you want. Add as many text boxes etc as you like.

The letter ‘A’ on the far right is your ‘font’ box, where you can change sizes, colours, fonts, alignments etc.

If you ever want to crop an image highlight the shape you want using your normal cursor ensuring the dotted square on the very left is highlighted and then the ‘crop’ button will appear.

TWO – INTERNET USERS

Another method for editing photos is online. There are various websites that will let you edit photos. For example, Pic Monkey, which gives a free trial – but then you have to pay monthly for its use. It does come highly recommended by Ali though. I believe Fotor is another site, but a quick google should tell you.

THREE – PC USERS

Over to you Geoffle:

You can use Paint. If you haven’t found this yet you can either open Paint by clicking the Start button , clicking All Programs, clicking Accessories, and then clicking Paint. Or you can choose a picture and right click to bring up the drop down menu. If you click on ‘Open with’ you will find Paint as an option. Or you can choose a picture and right click to bring up the drop down menu. If you click on ‘Open with’ you will find Paint as an option.

As Sacha explains with her Mac programme, Paint allows you to add text. Click on the A on the tool bar and this will provide you with a text box and the usual range of options. I’ve used a cool photo to give you an example. You can see the text box which can be moved and expanded as you like.

The same principle concerning croping applies here too.

Thanks Geoffle. If you didn’t know, he has just released a new book, called my Father and other liars. You can read his guest post on differentiating dialogue, and buy his books: My Father and Other Liars and Dead Flies and Sherry Trifle.

The post 4 Easy Steps to Seriously Awesome Blog Post Photos appeared first on Sacha Black.

I made a point recently about the lack of ‘actual’ writing I do. You know, with my hand and a real life pen. The post discussed Distributed Cognition, a concept that debates where the boundaries of thought are and one example is the use of a pen. Does the physicality of using a pen change your thought process through the action of writing? Where do your thoughts end, and the pen and ink begin, and what is the reciprocal effect of the thought, hand and pen interacting.

Why am I talking about this again? Well, in my author interviews, I ask a provocative question making a point that the publishing industry is in decline (I don’t actually think it is, but it tends to provoke an interesting answer). That question got me thinking, is penmanship in decline?

When I was a kid I used to have a pen pal, in fact, I had two. Didn’t everyone?

My mum still has her from childhood, a fact I love. When I went to school, I had a friend who liked reading and writing as much as I did. We used to hand write each other letters. I still have them. Dozens of them. I would painstakingly scribe words, colour and decorate pieces of paper in order to swap post with her, and more often than not we would stick a stamp on them (because back then you didn’t need a mortgage to buy a stamp) and pop them in a post box. I love nothing better than receiving post. I can’t remember the last time I received a letter.

I used to write a journal, I’ve said before I have a box of them in the loft, thousands hundreds of thousands of words scribed by hand, poured out in a labour of love for the written word. Then I started writing journals electronically. I don’t even know where they are now. Probably on a floppy disk somewhere *cringe* yes, I know what a floppy disk is. My wife’s students don’t. That’s depressing. We are only a decade older than them. But for them, the concept of ‘dial up’ is alien. They just don’t ‘get it’ and blank stares and sniggers follow her when she talks about floppy disks. I used an encyclopaedia – they use wikipedia.

That’s just ten years of development. TEN.

Is this evolution? Are we really developing? Or is this actually regression in disguise?

We apes evolved hands for a reason, to craft tools, feed ourselves, rear babies. I’m not interested in the argument that typing counts because you type with fingers. It doesn’t count. Not in my mind anyway. Theres no physicality. It’s mindless tapping learnt through rote memory.

The physicality of writing comes from having to push the pen around, forcing ink to curve to make shapes and markings. The mental process of deciding feeling where the next dot and cross has to go. I find it satisfying marking the page, leaving an imprint, knowing I created that design, story or letter. It’s gratifying.

Evolution is about progression, right? the ‘gradual development of something.’

Well penmanship is a skill and evolutionarily speaking, skills are things we had to learn too. If typing was just the next evolution, then why does its loss feel like such a sacrilege?

Is the loss of a skill not regression?

We are living in a technological black hole. Anthropologically speaking, in five hundred years how many people are going to be able to understand our culture? My guess is not many. The number of physical records is dropping, we are publishing books electronically rather than physically. Egyptians use to carve writings and explanations into granite, forever left as a guide to their culture. The internet records our culture. But, one day, the oil is going to run out and the electricity switch off. Then it’s all gone. Every record, every piece of information will disappear in a poof of smoke from the last drop burnt oil.

I’m troubled, I don’t know whether it’s my obsession with apocalyptic/dystopian fiction, or a worry founded in philosophical thought, but I am deeply concerned. Look at my wife’s students. Ten years is all it took for them to not understand a concept that to me (and I’m really not old),  is completely normal. I mean what about the words going into the dictionary that originate from text messages for goodness sake. In 2011 the Oxford English Dictionary added OMG, LOL and FYI into the dictionary. What does that mean?

I can’t shift this nagging thought that one day, kids won’t even be taught how to write any more. How long is it going to be? Thirty years? Fifty? Two hundred? It’s going to happen. The pen, and hand written scripture is becoming redundant, typing is faster and more efficient. You can erase your mistakes and no one will ever know. But aren’t mistakes part of what makes us fallible humans? Are we heading for a dystopian future where no one knows how to write?

Penmanship will become a lost art. 

There’s one more point I want to leave you with. My wife is dyslexic. She spells better on a computer. For her, the rote patterns of movement from tapping words is more kinesthetic and memorable than the closed hand structure of holding a pen. Her brain remembers how to spell patterns on a keyboard, but can’t remember the physicality of holding a pen to spell. Something I find truly fascinating. For her, although she believes the lost art of penmanship is regression, there is no doubting that for her, computers and typing are evolution. For me, a lover of pen and ink it’s regression.

What do you think?

The post The Lost Art of Penmanship – Evolution or Regression? appeared first on Sacha Black.

There used to be a time when I would accept nothing less than perfection. I still fight the frustration when I’m not completely perfect.

I’ve come to believe perfectionism it’s a disease. An infection that slowly eats away at your skin until it buries itself into your bone and spreads to every corner of your body like an angry cancer. The growing niggle questioning whether perfectionism is something to be strived for, or maybe, abhorred has become a raging monster, and now, a blog post…

As writers creative people we torture ourselves striving for something that deep down we all know is almost impossible to achieve. And if we somehow do achieve it, we spend our lives endlessly searching for that golden thread of genius within us so we can create another masterpiece. It’s like a drug, an addiction, a sought after high impossible to replicate.

But what is this blind search for perfectionism doing to our mental health and psyche? I talked about the shocking truth behind creativity recently, where there was an underlying point from Gilbert about depression in creative people.

Creative people in particular seem to suffer a high prevalence of depression, suicide and other mood disorders, including most frequently, bipolar disorder. Van Gogh was Bipolar and suffered tremendously until his suicide at 37. Syvia Plath, another sufferer with a mood disorder and eventually she committed suicide to at just 31. There are others, who vehemently argue against this trend of depression in creative people, and if you read enough research then like everything you can find enough studies that you end up sat on the fence completely befuddled.

I’m ignoring most of the science and am speaking from experience, with just a little science thrown in; from knowing many a creative person and seeing the effect of creativity gone awry, and from experiencing it myself.

My focus is on writers and one of the earliest studies of creativity and mood disorders focused on writers. It showed that 80% of writers had some variant of mood disorder. But why? Are we predisposed to mood disorders? Do we have hormone imbalances? Is it because we spend so long lost in our thoughts, pondering, reflecting, dissecting our every ideation and decision? Do we spend too long deliberating and judging ourselves? Does that lead the creative into a spiralling depression as we deconstruct ourselves and examine each tiny piece of us and our stories?

I know for me, boredom, and the restriction of my creativity is extremely bad for my mental state. I can end up in a very dark place if I am not allowed to thrive as a creative person. And yet equally, I can drive myself literally insane in the pursuit of that winning story, that character that makes someone cry, or laugh or fear for their safety. I can be so critical of myself its self destructive but especially for my sanity. I’m trying to pursue something I know I will never be able to achieve.

Despite constantly striving for perfection, I don’t believe it exists.

Will I ever be able to put the pen down, stop tweaking? Can you? I doubt it.

There’s just one more tweak? One tiny edit, a comma? A sentence? Sound familiar?

We grind ourselves down, wear down all our drive and pick and nag at our creative minds until we leave ourselves in a creative black hole. I think over striving for perfection gives us writers block and depression. If we pursue a concept that doesn’t exist we set ourselves up for constant failure.

Society is the same. Kids today think Barbi is perfection. (Yes that really is a real woman)

Kids think that plastic fantastic is acceptable and something to aim for. But sometimes when you get a little too hooked on achieving the impossible on too much plastic this happens:

Ok, maybe I’m being a little facetious but you see the point I’m making?

I wrote a poem last #1000speak, so this time I decided to share something personal. I have edited this, removed some of the bits that made me cringe, but it’s mostly intact. I wrote this piece when I was just coming out of a dark hole, it’s an odd piece of writing, more of a stream of consciousness rather than a story or anything much, but I think it makes the point, creative depression is not good by any standard:

Phantom Limb by Sacha Black

I am watching my life through his eyes, at his mercy.

My glass was always half empty, its why I never noticed the cracked cup, the leaking liquid. He didn’t arrive with the grandeur entrance I expected. He snuck quietly into my life like the silent thief, slyly changing the minutia, stealing my belongings until he consumed everything.

I can never see the world through those precious rose spectacles I used to have. The virgin eyes I owned are gone. Stolen. He took them for himself, replaced them with his dark and twisted ones. I didn’t even notice. Not until I was already exhausted from staring through his shadowy specs.

I understand what numb is; to really feel nothing.

It’s infinite.

He took my feelings away one by one. Every happy thought tarnished by a rusty anesthetized memory.

I am left watching my life play out through him.

I am his phantom limb. I see my life, but I’m not really there. I used to be present, alive, able to breathe. But now I’m surrounded by a vast suffocating nothing.

He torments me with the life I could lead. I am ashamed of him. I am meant to be strong. Unbreakable. Instead I crumbled like an ash statue. He blew over my life, and I drifted apart piece by piece.

He is the dirty little secret I punish myself for.

I’m tired of being a phantom limb.

I will not do it any more.

No matter how foggy his spectacles get, I will smear the lenses until I can see the tunnel in the distance. I know there is a light at the end of it.

***

I’m not suggesting we should stop striving or aiming for the top. I’m saying sometimes we need to take a step back and remember, perfection is usually impossible. What we create may well be someone else’s idea of perfection. You will be someone’s favourite author. I highly doubt whatever I create, no matter how many drafts or how many edits I do, I will ever be truly happy with it. So why not accept that? And be kind to ourselves?

We need to start believing that just because ‘WE’ don’t think something is perfect, doesn’t mean somebody else won’t. There is no perfect – perfect is unobtainable because what you think is perfect, I won’t. No two concepts of perfect align. Our own concepts of perfectionism are dangerous, and unrealistic. Praise yourself, nurture yourself away from that pedestal. Perfection isn’t all that anyway, it’s boring, outdated. It’s the goody two shoes at the front of the class, the ‘know it all’ everyone sniggers at when they finally get a question wrong.

Isn’t that the point? Humanity is interesting because we are full of mistakes and problems. Aren’t the best characters the ones who fuck up, and make mistakes? Isn’t that why we secretly like the anti-hero?

Nurture yourself. Stop striving for the unachievable. No body likes Miss Perfect anyway.

But more important than anything, don’t forget…

The post Nurture Yourself in the Pursuit of Perfection #1000speak appeared first on Sacha Black.

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It simply gives you one word and you have 60 seconds to write about it… I cant seem to get it to give me a different word, but I am thinking I may use this when i get stuck or lack inspiration and take out the dictionary….

I had the word:

‘welt’… and I wrote:

The welt was etched into her skin like the script on a tombstone. She pawed at it as pain burned up her arm. She wondered whether it would ever heal, knowing deep down it was going to leave a scar.

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But first a quick update –

I’m now at 27… and something weeks…. how did that happen!? I think that puts me firmly in the third trimester?

I have no idea what has happened in all the blogs I read, so forgive me I will spend the next week catching up on everyones.

BUT I have finished my dissertation! YAY. I still can’t quite get my head around the freedom yet! I still feel like I am meant to be doing something and I am still clock watching like I am under pressure! Except I’m not!!

We had a car accident a couple of weeks ago, were all fine, there were a few hospital trips, the teeniest of ruptures which meant blood passed between me and the baby but it was soooo small no one was worried.

So, now I just waddle more than I was waddling because of the SPD!!

So I am free now, to do whatever I want… So I have created a pile of books to read the height of me! and I have got my novel back out finally after what feels like a life time… and all things creative… I have been making wallets – duct tape wallets – pics below.

and now my problem…

The Creative / Artistic Problem… HELP…

I have been collecting images and such like on Pinterest and google as inspiration for different aspects of my novel. I want to do mood/picture/inspiration boards of some variety… I feel like I need to write notes in/around them, but the other part of me thinks I should have notes and images separately… I cant really decide how to do it or what they should look like… I have 670 images that need cutting out in preparation for this, and they will make several different boards, but I would love some suggestions as to how I should do it…

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