note for later

semi-rant: "style is a crutch" -> "style is a trap"

getting out of that trap by deliberately pushing away from what's "easy" and into what's hard
yes, everyone does this, every artist had that phase.

what do you always do? stop doing it. maybe you'll come back to it, maybe you won't. when you come back it'll be conscious.

Kill your "style" to save it. If I hadn't done this three or four times I'd still be doing the horrible awkward pastiche of Jim Davis that I had when I was in high school. seriously.

art thought

Not having a digital camera handy, I don't have the core tool for this one. I'd try it if I did.

Go to the middle of your city on a beautiful, sunny day. The populated, people-filled areas. Bring your camera. You'll probably want a tripod, maybe even a remote shutter-release cable.

Set it down and take a ton of photos of one location. Fairly rapid succession so they've all got pretty much the same lighting conditions.

Now bring them home and stack them all up in Photoshop. Erase every person. Erase every passing car. Erase every reflection of them.

Empty the place of life. Plants stay. But do birds? Do cats? Squirrels? That's up to you, I suppose.

To make the trick obvious I guess you'd want to do a series of this, that includes shots of famously always-busy locations. Somewhere you'd hope most viewers would see something wrong in.