Do Her Eyes Follow You?

This is the cover image for this week's issue of the Piker Press.

I was very pleased with this result, as I've been beating the crap out of myself trying to learn how to use Photoshop effectively. One has to remember that it was only in the year 2001 that I learned how to do Instant Messaging, and only a couple months ago learned how to load illustrations or photos to the Press.

I'm pleased by my progress.

Last week I found a bamboo stake and fixed it in the ground at the far end of the pool. I had a reason for doing so: this year's lovely red dragonfly needed a place to land and survey his/her territory. In less than an hour, the dragonfly that had been buzzing our yard found the pole and alit. So fond of the stake is the bug that I can stand a foot away from him/her and the dragonfly is quite willing to allow me the intimacy.

My husband asked me how I knew to put a stake up for the dragonfly. "When there have been gladiolus spikes in the same place, the dragonflies land on them," I told him. He was a little surprised that I had drawn a connection, not because I'm stupid, but because he'd not thought of making an artificial spike to replace the dug-up gladioli. I could have told him it was a hedge-shaman thing, that we know how the wild things prefer their environment, but in reality, it wasn't much different than knowing that if you want to make changes to an image in Photoshop, the first thing you need to do is duplicate a layer or add a new one to experiment on.

I know that if a bug lands repeatedly on a certain tall plant, a surrogate tall "plant" will be an acceptable place to land.

By the same reasoning, if every attempt at modifying an image is going to produce a mess in Photoshop, just add an additional or copied layer and it will become an acceptable place to experiment.

When I crawled out from my cave under the tree-roots, I saw the dragonfly on the perch beside the water and told him/her, "Thank you."