Okay, now don’t laugh. I’m sure at some stage of your life before you got to here and now, you were once a fangirl. Come on, admit it. You caught every TV show/film, read every magazine article, surreptitiously hung posters in your room, scribbled names in the back page of your notebook and maybe, just maybe wrote fanfiction.

What? Who, me? Erm…moving on.

Yes, I was and still is a fangirl. But there was a period in my recent past which started off as some crazy fangirling but then brought me some of the most wonderful friendships in my life now. I’m proud to say that we outgrew that phase and came out more adult than we expected.

But of course, the fangirly moments were really awesome too! It was thanks to Jackie S that I have my very own, original autographed portrait (sort of) of Orlando Bloom. This was circa 2006 I think. I created a graphic wallpaper and posted it online, not saying where, and Jackie printed it off and took it with her while she waited for Orlando to appear at the Kingdom of Heaven premier in London.

There was much long distance squeeing on the phone when I got this in the mail.

It was this fascination with Orlando that got me started Photoshopping, or PSsing as my good friend Lee likes to call it. We chatted online at the weekends, trading resource sites, techniques, new trends, etc all for the sake of perfecting that blend mode and colour combination. It was all worth it.

Elizabethtown was a good film which provided fodder for icon-makers and wallpaper artists. This was one of a few that I made which deviantArt deleted since it apparently breached copyright. Whatever. As you can see, I was crazy about blurs and misty looks at that time.

Will Turner…*sigh*. He was great eye-candy, esp with the leather scabbard and the bare chest. And esp with the bandana towards the end. I like my wallpapers dark and earthy, with as little frill as possible. KISS is our motto.

One of the first wallpapers I ever did featured this high resolution photo of Orlando. It was horrendous! About two years after practising on Photoshop and learning that “less is more”, I re-did the wallpaper and this is what came up. As you can see I still love motion blurs. I’m rather proud of this one too.

Ah, the “Che” wallpaper. Some of my KM sistahs commented that this wallpaper evoked images of that famous poster of Che Guevarra. That is quite humbling considering this is nothing but the wanderings of a restless mind, and fingers. I remember working on this one and enjoyed every layer of it – all 25 or so!

Good memories all around. I wish I had extra time in the day/week to PiSs around again, just like old times. To be quite honest with you, I have gotten rusty and could not remember what some of the tools do! I feel a self-imposed Photoshop challenge coming on.