Thank you as always for your very kind words, Karlon. Today may be the day that I attempt to get more caught up in getting my panel designs into this thread, since I do not want to be two years behind! Since my last additions, much has changed... firstly, there has been made a change to how this site presents itself, in that now verse citations display as a link to Logos software in order to show the actual verse. This has messed up thousands of my own posts where I had verse citations in a "hidden" font under the panel, so that text would show up in my post stream without being visible on the boards... the visibility on the boards being redundant, since the panel itself shows the desired/intended text. Personally I do not care for the translation the Logos software uses, but it is not the worst one there is, either LOL. So now I have to go through the text document where I keep the record of all panels and their urls, and change how I write out the verse citation if there is one, because for the most part I do not want these links in my posts.
Another thing that has changed is that instead of collecting bits and pieces made available by others, on sites too numerous to mention by contributors that number into the millions, contributors that make their ephemera freely available to anyone who wants to use it in their own personal projects such as I do, I have started using an AI generator connected to one of the main sites where I used to collect the generations of others. Of course on that website, which is Pixabay, there is quite an assortment of images made available from many different mediums, meaning, there is original artwork done by hand, AI generations, and photography, among other media. From what I had collected since I began these designs back in 2018, I already had many thousands of images saved to my device to collage with, and since generating my own beginning last December, I have many thousands more, as in the first week alone I am fairly certain I generated and saved at least five thousand images, many floral designs which were stand alone, but also outdoor flower meadow types of scenes, as well as many thousand female figures, which as you know, is a staple for me, and lots of interiors as well. AI is a bit infamous for its inability to get hands right, the number and shape of fingers confounding it terribly, and faces itself are not always very good, lacking detail in the eyes and having harsh lines where undesirable, but this plays perfectly into what I do in constructing faces out of bits and pieces. Plus, the images I generate are fairly small, so I still need to put at least two images together to get my preferred format and size...
I do still use some of the things collected in years gone by, especially borders, frames, and special effects, as well as florals and
faces and facial features too, of course... plus I am using a second AI generator, mostly just for faces, as I find it gives finer results.
One last change is that I have a new laptop. I am still able to use the one I received from my daughter after her dad passed away in 2021, and in fact it is the one I am using now, as the new one is at work, which saves me a lot of trouble packing up and putting back together all the connectors and wires and this and that LOL plus the weight of it all was getting to me, even though it was under ten pounds all told in my knapsack, it was too much if I was also carrying other things. So now I only need to transport my mouse (LOL) and the portable hard drive where all my images are saved. The touch pad on the new device works (unlike on this one where if I click down it will not click back up), but I cannot do the finer work with it, so mouse is better just for that reason, as I have always been allowed to spend time at work when we are not busy doing my own thing. God is good!
