I’m not really a dreamer; You won’t catch me whimsically conjuring up a world of peonies and unicorns in my head on the Tube commute. I wish I could be a little dreamier, but I’m more a dot ‘i’s and cross ‘t’s’ kinda gal and anyone who tries to go outside the lines needs to veer that felt tip back to safety.
But I do imagine. I have an imagination and while I can’t cross that line, I can think outside the box (or circle; it feels more of a circle). Where dreaming seems a little less tangible, imagination feels like it might end up somewhere real – somewhere with, perhaps, a horse that looks like a unicorn and some crackin’ snacks (think Wotsits, Skips or anything E-colour addled with a maize-like consistency). It’s this imagination that I’m seeing develop every day in my daughter, Mae.
From imaginary tea parties with lions and tigers and bears to believing she is, in fact, Spiderman, I’m delighting in her imaginary realm the moment she sets down her backpack after a day in the ‘office’ (her term for daycare).
Perhaps it’s our far-out thoughts that drew us to Adobe Asset Labs Experiment #1 – a frickin’ ace tutorial that allows you to create bespoke prints from ideas you can only imagine. Fear not, you don’t need Tracey Emin-esque artistic skills; this is one of those tools that makes you look better than you really are.
I started by downloading a Creative Cloud trial and the Adobe Capture CC app – consider this your adult version of a stack of felt tip pens and paper. With these two in place, the world is your creative oyster. Now, for someone who is tech-shy, everything was made super easy with this tutorial from Petra Gardefjord.
Then it was a case of working on a design together – she may be two but Mae has strong artistic/life opinions. I scrolled through some photos before she stopped me at a leopard print image I had on my phone. ‘Mama tiger’ she said. I can only assume this is because I wear little other than leopard print (which garners the occasional ‘Marleeeeene’ from my husband), so am, perhaps, tiger-like (better than elephant, perhaps?) in my aesthetic. Either way, we went with it.
Once this was uploaded, the Adobe Capture app loosens up all the lines, making it look like you might have just sketched it. A few buttons pressed later and I’d given Mae’s suitably jazzy design a fuchsia pink hue (I left the backdrop white because one doesn’t want to over-gild the lily).
And there she was, our very own bespoke leopard print design – the perfect wallpaper for my iPhone lock screen. While I’m no daydream believer, it’s good once in a while to let your imagination run wild.
Adobe Asset Labs Experiment #1 can be followed here and you can easily download your free trial of Creative Cloud here #MakeIt
**This post was written in partnership with Adobe**
