Hey gang! I just returned back to the bus after an excellent week up in Seattle for Photoshop Week with creativeLIVE. Photoshop Week was an online, live Photoshop conference with 13 instructors and over 40 classes. I taught five sessions, three on Actions & Automation, one on Blending Modes and one on What’s New in Photoshop CS6.1. All of my classes went really well, and we’ve been getting excellent feedback. My personal favorite was a comment that came from the creativeLIVE chat rooms and said, “When Chuck Norris needs a [Photoshop] demo, he calls Ben Willmore.” Whoever said that, thank you! That was awesome!

Lesa Snider, myself and Dave Cross are on set at creativeLIVE during a panel discussion. Thanks to the creativeLIVE team for posting this photo.

Photoshop Week was much different from all my previous experiences with creativeLIVE, in that there were other instructors (many of them friends of mine) to interact with and learn from. In case you missed the line-up, here’s who was instructing, besides myself:

• Dave Cross
• Lesa Snider
• Lindsay Adler
• Colin Smith
• Joel Grimes
• Khara Plicanic
• Aaron Nace
• Jack Davis
• Jared Platt
• Kevin Kubota
• Jason Hoppe
• Jed Taufer

Here’s another one courtesy of creativeLIVE…. fun with the staff and instructors.

Now that the week has come to a close, all of the Photoshop Week classes are now available for purchase over on the creativeLIVE site. You can read about the individual classes, buy them separately, or get them as a set HERE.

Since the Photoshop Week sessions are done by 4:00 every day, I got to spend a lot of time hanging out with old friends as well as making new ones. We had some nice dinners and explored the city a lot. Instead of blabbing on about the week, here are some photos. Photos are more fun anyway 🙂

Me and Karen at the Chihuly, Garden and Glass Museum. If you’ve never been to this place, I highly recommend it. Dale Chihuly is an incredible glass artist and the museum has a colorful, whimsical, yet organic feel to it.

Yup… this is me with life-size bacon. Throughout the week, I had been making some random bacon references during my classes – enough so that folks were starting to think it was pretty funny. Then I come across this awesome bacon in Pike Place Market! What a coincidence! She happened to be walking around with life-size ketchup and mustard bottles as well.

A bunch of iPhone shots that Karen took while exploring the city. She used an app called Diptic to put them all together like this.

Here I am with Karen and Aaron Nace, of Phlearn.com, at the Seattle Space Needle. (Karen and Aaron are actually not related. It’s the first time either of them had met another non-family member with their same last name before!) We actually lucked out this day in that it was sunny, so our view from the top of the needle was pretty nice.

Me, Colin Smith and Aaron Nace in front of Kangaroo & Kiwi, an Aussie/Kiwi pub in Seattle. Colin is from New Zealand and was anxious to check the place out and get some of their Kiwi Cuisine. Both Colin and I had meat pies, a classic dish in Australia/New Zealand. The food was really good and the place had a fun vibe. At some point, we’d like to return in the evening to see what the night scene is like there.

As I mentioned above, we’re back at the bus, which is in the Eugene area. We’ll spend the next week here getting work done and overseeing the vintage bus project. If you’ve been following the vintage bus story, it has been seeing daily progress and when we returned just a little while ago, we found that the mock-up of the interior is being installed pretty quickly. To get more info on my vintage bus project, you can check out the Creative Cruiser facebook page HERE.

More to come…