The pool at Hotel Wailea on Maui is my favorite hotel pool on all the Hawaiian Islands. 

It's been two weeks since I last posted to my 365 Project. I had reached a point, after 90 days, of really dreading trying to find or create an image to post each day. For some, creating content every day is not a problem. It has been a problem for me. One of my long standing, self-defeating issues I'm working on is the pressure I place on myself and the comparisons I make between myself and others (artists, programmers, creators in general) regarding  the quality and quantity of work they put out. When I feel I can't put out what I consider to be my best work, all the time, I get frustrated and tend to look for other distractions or plunge myself deeper into billable client work. 

Instead of doing that two weeks ago, I decided to simply take a break, re-focus on what I want to accomplish with my 365 Project, and not make a big deal out of not posting anything for the past two weeks. Initially I thought I'd take a week off but last Friday I still wasn't ready. Today I'm ready. 

Here's what I've come up with:

1. My 365 Project is simply going to be about posting an image every day. No pressure on having a deep, philosophical meaning, or it being the absolute best or most creative image I've ever created. Just simply post a photograph each day. 
2. I may or may not post a description with the image. But at the very least I'm going to give each one a unique title and list the apps used.
3. Use my 365 Project as a venue to experiment with the incredible apps that are available for the iPhone and iPad. 
4. Loosen my self-imposed restrictions of the photos having to have been taken on the iPhone. While I still won't be posting images I take with my Canon, I will be using some DSLR images within the iPhone and iPad apps that I experiment with. 
5. I've identified several other websites that I will use to post what I consider to be my best work. I can relax into my 365 Project as a venue for fun and experimentation.
6. I'm lifting the restriction of only posting via my iPhone or iPad. I've proved it can be done everyday. It simply takes a lot longer than posting with my MacPro and full-sized keyboard. "Time" is one of my most important non-renewable resources. Using my time wisely is one of my guiding principles. 

So, with that in mind, the image above was created last week using a very fun app called Tiny Planets. It takes a photograph and "spins" it around on itself. It's a blast and creates some really incredible photos once you know how to compose the original source photo. There will be many more Tiny Planet photos in the days and weeks to come. 

If you've been following my 365 Project, you may have noticed that for the month of March I somehow started down a "self-portrait" track. The reviews (comments on Flickr, mostly) have been kind but few in numbers when compared to earlier postings in the Project. Which is fine. I remind myself that I'm not doing my 365 Project for reviews or comments.  I’m doing it mostly as a test to see if I can stick with it for 365 days and out of curiosity to see where it takes me and what I discover along the way.

Early in the project, I had some time in the evenings when I was able to spend a few hours on some of my favorite pieces so far. For example, 1/365, 2/365, 18/365, and 32/365. I'd love to do more of these but I don't always have the time or energy at the end of the day. 

Last night, I had both the time and the energy to create another favorite. 72/365 - Gingered Self Portrait, like the others linked above, was created in the amazing Brushes app on my iPad using several photos from my iPhone. In addition to being an incredibly powerful and intuitive painting and compositing iPhone and iPad application, Brushes allows you to export your finished work as a high quality  QuickTime movie that shows each brushstroke as a frame. The final effect is that you can watch a work of art being created. 

My work is a little different than the regular Brushes galleries you'll find on the Brushes website gallery and Brushes Flickr group.  Because I'm using photographs, textures, and layer blending modes, my video exports look more like flashes of photos and less like automated drawings and paintings. But, for photographers that are experimenting with the amazing photography and painting apps on their iPhones and iPads, I thought my creation process would be fun to see. 

The video is only 1 minute and 8 seconds long. 18 seconds of that is title and credits (created in Apple's iMovie). 5 seconds is a still frame at the end showing the finished image. The remaining 45 seconds shows 1350 individual video frames. 45 seconds at 30 frames per second = 1350 individual frames. Each frame represents a change, a stroke, a blending mode change, a photo layer import or deletion, a layer opacity change, etc. 1350 different decisions over the course of  about 2 hours that it took to create the final image. And you can see at the beginning and for most of the video, I ended up with something very different than where I thought I wanted to begin.

Hope you enjoy this little peek into my creative process and I hope I have many more evenings with both the time and energy in which to create this type of work. 

Oh. And the audio soundtrack in the video I threw together with 3 different loops in Apple's GarageBand. 

PS: The rules I broke for my 365 Project? The final piece, the video and audio, was created on, and uploaded from, my MacPro, and not my iPhone or iPad.