Added 1 new A* page:
The US Census Bureau called me today to ask me about my time management in the last 24-hour period. Well I think I probably broke their curve. : P Actually they've been calling me all week but didn't leave a message identifying themselves until this afternoon. : PPP But they seem to like me for some odd reason, 'cause they got me for another phone survey--of like income and stuff, which was another rather borderline sampling I should think--just a few months ago.
Anyhoo the time management didn't improve much today because I was fighting my own inclinations once again--see, yesterday I started getting nagging feelings of shame that I've been using a Photoshop filter like Hard Light (actually I've been doing two on top of each other lately, plus a little Levels gamma adjustment afterwards for good measure) to come up with my final colors for these pages, rather than inventing those crazy colors myself; they're all just combinations of three 0 to 255 values, right? I should be able to come up with those just as well as a filter! And then the filter was also doing something to the black lines today that I didn't like, although I think in the end that was just my fault for not having set the lines dark enough, and I still had the original lines so I could remedy it.
Well I learned some tricks with the lines but try as I might I couldn't come up with colors all my own that satisfied me; really I think it's just that because I don't fully understand the Hard Light filter, its results always surprise me a little, so it helps me discover color combinations that wouldn't have occurred to me on my own--like today's rather Swedish palette. Of course then I go back and try to tweak the base colors and then run them through the filter again to see what pops out this time, but anyway I don't have the process fully under control, so accident can play a part, and I suspect I like that. Maybe I should worry then that eventually even I *will* figure out how Hard Light works and I'll know just what will happen with the colors before I process them and the result will no longer be a surprising adventure, and maybe at that point this coloring method will no longer work for me and all the colors will become boring and predictable. I dunno! Fortunately I'm sometimes bad at learning things, so we'll see. ; )
Here are a few of the other color and line results from experiments this evening--these are more manual, before I finally decided to stick with the double Hard Light processing; there are nice things about them I think but in the end they just didn't have that certain zing:
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