My phone’s Camera has photoediting tools and among them is a nifty enhancer called Portrait Blur. It sharpens the focus on the focal point you choose and the further away from the focal point you get the more automatic blurring takes place.

This gave me an idea for an acrostic poem. Since the word Portrait has eight letters, and Blur has four, my acrostic could have four couplets, and the end-rhyme words would have their last letters be the B, L, U and R of Blur. The illustration would be a switcheroo, with the background in shap focus and the face, the Portrait part, all blurry.

Then my thoughts jumped to the notion of adding the word Self, creating a triple acrostic with Portrait in the middle and Self and Blur as bookends. I might then create a blurry self-portrait and have in the background a still Life with a few of my ceramic birds (I have made dozens) in sharp focus. This would yield the nice possibility of it becoming a psychological self-portrait, with the quirky birds as my alter egos.

So here we are in the blissful throes of creation, with a firm foundation for a work of art and a long way to go to reach fruition. One of the phrases I will tag this post with is “creative process.”

If you look at the attached photo you’ll see a placeholder drawing of cotton swabs, which I use to blend pencil marks for shading and will be handy for blurring as well, and a layout of the Self Portrait Blur acrostic with subject-to-change end rhyme words drab, lab, quail, derail,lieu, caribou, sector, and nectar. If I am a sufficiently nimble wordsmith the resulting poem will have a consistent meter and a theme related to “Self-Portrait Blur,” and when read out loud will not seam like an acrostic at all. My confidence that I will be able to do this is sky-high, because in the last eighteen years I have done it hundreds of times.