Make it a day when Art is Fun

I wonder how many professionals have a "fun day" at their job? Do accountants ever take a day to have fun with numbers? Do attorneys ever have a workshop that is enjoyable...nattering over obscure points of law? Or what about physicians? Do any of them ever stop for a day of microbe gazing as a diversion?

Am I placing artists in the category of working professionals? Yes, indeed I am. Many professional artists actually refer to themselves as working artists...hence the work part. Artists love what they do - be it painting, sculpting, digital redering, dancing, writing, acting, photographing [whatever the medium] - but it's not always 'fun.' Completed works of art represent many hours of research, design and process...sometimes long and exhausting hours. The long hours may end in a pleasing result, but the long hours may not have been all that fun.

So. Here's a suggestion: take a day and have some fun with art. Not an artist? This is a suggestion you, too, can do.

See the photo above? It is a photo mosaic of one of my own art photos. I was introduced by another artist to a new-to-me website called mosaically.com. Oh how fun is this! It is free and it is user-friendly and easy. Do two things:

choose a photo of yours you want to re-imagine; could be a photo of a flower or of your child
choose a bunch of photos to use to "paint" the image with

That's pretty much it. Follow the directions, make a couple creative decisions and you're done. You get to see a preview of your creation within a few minutes and once you decide it's what you want, it takes mosaically.com a couple hours to get you a nice high-res version. [the low res version you get to download for free; the high res you do have to purchase]

I downloaded the low-resolution version [that's what is here] and this, at left, is a close-up detail of part of it. You can see the tiny images inside the big image. Pretty cool.