Assignment (Visual) 13: Take a concept, one word, and plug it into Flickr and take the first 50 images and average them using Photoshop or similar program.

I was inspired by a graceful, though fuzzy image of a jellyfish grabbed from a friend’s underwater footage. In my mind’s eye, I could see the jellyfish replicated so that it appeared to leave an effervescent trail as it floated toward the viewer.

That didn’t happen.

Everything went swimmingly until I discovered the environmental map and imagined how cool it would be to have a source of light in the image — one that cut through the darkness and illuminated the jellyfish. Two hours later, I was really in deep water. So deep that I started taking a protocol in hopes of learning from the ordeal. Here’s a sample:

6:56 Somehow can’t get back to light effects.
6:57 Realized how to turn off color tools. Select move tool.
6:58 Cannot add environmental map again. Better to abort. Deleted all.

Believe me. It was not easy to delete all that work but I felt confident that I had learned enough the I could redo what I’d done right and avoid the pitfalls that got me into my untenable situation.

The gamble paid off. I remembered the basic process and made some improvements along the way. But, it’s still not the jellyfish trailing efferevesence.

So I’ll just call it my “jamfish” that teaches me to deal with the frustration of not being able to realize my vision but keep the faith that someday I will.