You may not know this about me, but in my soul, I'm an artist. At my core, I'm a musician, a photographer, a painter, a writer, a poet, etc. I'm all of the arts. Ain't no art that I ain't attempted to art. A thug even tried to scrapbook once until I realized that thugs don't do scraps because gangsters don't dance, they boogie.
Here's the problem, I'm pretty good at some arts (music, writing, poetry when I give a fuck) and pretty terrible at others, like, painting. Several of my paintings are hanging in my house, more because it's my party and I can cry if I want to than because they're pieces that the world needs to see. Not for nothing, five of my pieces are hanging in one bathroom. You read that right. Painting ain't exactly my forte.
One area I've always loved 'pacifically is photography. A few of my own pictures that I particularly liked are hanging up in my house, having been put on canvas. While I'm no professional, I do think that I have a pretty decent eye for pictures, but moreso, turning a regular picture into art. Here's the problem - and always has been the problem - I can't figure out how to execute my ambition. I'm also too artsy for my own good at times.
Fooooor instance, I suck at making flyers. Which is a bit of a handicap for a person like me who is a party promoter for whom flyers are pretty much a necessity. But I can never just convey the image in the most commercial, accessible way possible. I have to art every flyer up. Ninety-five percent of my flyers have been shot down by the people I'm working with because I have no chill. We have a picture of hot women from the last party to put on the flyer? Cool, let me turn them into art, bruh. I suck at that job.
I have over 12,000 pictures on my phone. I've tried to filter and re-filter and art up at least 40 percent of them. I'm that dude who will use the Instagram filters to make a picture look good, screen shot that picture, re-up it in IG with a different filter to get a different effect, then open it up in my Photoshop Lite app and attempt to do more to it. And we're talking about a picture of grass. I want the blades of grass to be crispy. I do too much is the main bullet point here. Which is made worse by the fact that I can never quite get to what I'm looking for, artistically speaking.
And then it happened. I discovered the Prisma App. Angels sang. Pimps chaliced. Police stopped treating Black people like shooting practice test dummies. (That did not happen.) Prisma is an app for people like me who are artists at heart and want to hang their own works throughout their homes but don't have the skill or wherewithall to create these works from scratch. Prisma, in effect is an app that makes artists out of aspirants. I'm better because it exists. And you can be too.
But before I tell you how hip-hop and Prisma saved my life, let me tell you a quick story about how I discovered this app even existed. I have several friends who have achieved various levels of fame. Some are newspaper famous. Others are everybody-reading-this-right-now-knows-who-they-are famous. Some are social media famous. Well one of those famous folks posted a picture on Facebook that had me feeling way up. I mean, I felt blessed. And I was like, man, how did she do that? I thought perhaps, because famous, somebody she knows, some artist, made the picture for her and she posted it. I also didn't want to ask because I didn't want to be that guy who was late to the party I wanted to actually go to. Like, I don't mind being late to a party I don't care about. That's the SnapChat party for me. But this party? Man, I like to be early or on-time for these joints.
And then I saw how another person's FB profile picture looked, not a famous person, and was like, hey SOMEBODY ELSE DID IT. I had no idea where to look or how to look for what I didn't know what was. On Tuesday morning, though, as Facebook attempted to tell me to become friends with several people I hope to never speak to in real life ever again, I noticed another perso
n had a similar effect, but this time, the tag was on the picture in the bottom right corner. And it said PRISMA. So me being the real nword that I am, went straight to the app store, punched in Prisma and then the pimps chaliced. I spent, easily, the next hour, arting the shit out of several pictures of family and objects and lions, and tigers, and bears. Oh, my. I was so gone. Like it was a challenge.
Look, I'm not saying that I'm a great artist. But with Prisma, I'm motherfucking Basquiat out here. This app has me turning my children into the proper works of art that they are. I can now outfit my entire house with my own creations and people will ask me, "damn, how or where did you get that done?" And I can say, without missing a beat, "I did that, b. I'm an artist." I want to be an artist. I'm glad I can be one now.
The filters are amazing. They bring so much richness and color to the table, its like a Lil Wayne outfit in my phone all day, ainday, anyday, every damn day. For somebody like me who likes to art everything, I've found the ying to my yang. The up to my down. The left to my right. The mountain that's not too high to the valley that isn't too low. Art filters and photo effects at the same damn time.
This app is the second most life altering app in my life behind Shazam. To the people at Prisma Labs, Inc. you are the real MVP because you enabled me to be the artist in real life that I've been in my head and heart for years.
I'm better today because of Prisma.
Thanks, Obama.