Conventional wisdom suggests that you should paint the room you do your digital editing in with a flat, dark, neutral color. This minimizes the potential color-casting of the light which reflects onto your monitor, and lets you set up a viewing area using lighting which mimics the color coming out of your monitor -- that way, the white on the paper will look like the white on your monitor, so you know all the colors fall where they should.
Of course, you also need a separate area, or second light source, which mimics the sorts of crappy lighting conditions most people will actually look at your work in, but that's a digression.
It's sort of hard to imagine the space of my someday-studio, and even harder to decorate it in an interesting fashion, all of this being in my mind's eye. But the last several fiction authors whom I've read all said the same thing in their Afterwards that I'm hearing in these interviews with successful photographers on these podcasts. That point is, no one has ever become great who was cautious, no one who ever said "Oh, no, that would be going too far." The famous ones, the rich ones, the happy ones all say the same thing: be as cool as you can be, and then have a friend talk you into being even cooler. Shoot for the Awesome, and hope you overshoot the mark. Wear your passion and energy on your sleeve, or else play a different game.
This is in stark contradiction to my mother's favorite saying, which is "What will Other People think?"
I can't find the Afterward now, but one of my favorite writers, I think it is
Steven Brust, has a plaque over his computer which reads "Be Extremely Cool" that he looks at every time he thinks he's gone too far. I think that would make a good addition to my editing room too.
Edit: Steven Brust responded to my attempt to find his quote:
Amul @ 27 : First of all, thanks.
Second, I have quoted, on a number of occasions, advice Gene Wolfe once gave a certain writer. The advice is to tape a 3×5 index card above your computer, and on the card write, “I’m going to tell you something cool.” The advice has been attributed to me a couple of times, but it is actually Mr. Wolfe’s, though I certainly subscribe to the spirit.
But I also think I'll take a giant 3" brush and a can of flat black paint to the dark grey wall behind my computer, and I'll write these words like some kind of messianic Last Message:
Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when my fear is gone I will turn and face fear's path, and only I will remain.
And perhaps, on the door, with a more delicate hand, I will write
It is by will alone that I set my mind in motion.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
