Retouched

I spent last night faffing about in Photoshop, trying to regain my retouching skillz. Back when I was still working at the ad agency, I used to be almost unreasonably good at retouching, but my skills have been atrophying, so I've only practised on myself, and uploaded some of the results to my own personal MySpace. Nothing major, just playing with the colour filters, removing pot bellies and double chins, erasing creases, making my legs more model-like, that sort of thing. Please let me know (here, not there) if you spot any obvious edits - more because I'm curious as to how convincing the effects are because I'm dealing with flat screen monitors, where it's hard to detect edits.

I've been doing some more advanced photoshopping at home, but won't upload the results until I'm happy with them. There's really not that much difference between fixing a double chin in a photograph, and the airbrush style photoshop art I used to do. It's nice to make myself look like one of my cartoons, especially when many of the originals made me wail with angst "I don't really look like that, do I?" and I've always considered myself to be too ugly to be vain.

That's not a cry for compliments, BTW, that's my genuine self assessment, though it doesn't stop me from being disappointed in my own lack of looks. Been reading too much Germain Greer and it's really been depressing me, how I guilty I am of so many of the things she's been talking about, the fetishisation of romance, the disgust and self loathing of the female body. And yet, here I am contributing to body fascism by perfecting myself in art form.

Last night, I dreamed I was in NYC, staying with Lauren in LIC (I think she lives in Brooklyn, which is odd but I was around the corner from Kaliflwr). And in my dream, I found the most amazing Boots Of Sex - they weren't just riding/pirate boots, they were proper, full on, thigh high Cavaliers Boots with loads of buckles and everything. As I was walking down High Holborn, strangely enough Jones Bootmaker had a sale on! With lovely riding boots included! Bloody things didn't zip up over my calves, though. It's mine own fault for walking too much, and for not wearing stupid high heels which destroy your leg muscles to make your legs slim. Sigh.

Now I just have to figure out how to upload old demos to MySpace. Like a fule, I burned them as AIF files, so I could get them on the same CD as the photos, and neither Windoze nor MySpace want to recognise them as music files. Sigh.