Undiscovered designs

Work can be inspiring in a lot of ways: What you are doing can directly be interesting (especially if you are an artist or musician etc.); the way work is done can be exhilarating (you could have time limits or have to work with some special devices and have to overcome these obstacles)...
When it comes to producing commercial visuals, oftentimes the content can be uninteresting to you personally, you might find no big challenge, you might feel you could do this job with closed eyes. Of course you still give your best for the best product, but you may not call it inspiring.
What I found very often when doing retouching, is that a whole new, totally different visual can come to existence when you take a step back and look at what you have done right now.

You really have to have a little distance to your work for finding this, but still be your creative self to realize the beauty of this side-product.

When using tone curves or other effects in Photoshop, the effect is controlled by a mask that is either created by using channels or other means or is drawn by hand. If you are good, you don`t even really have to look at the mask you have drawn, but my suggestion is that you do! It surely depends on your taste in art, but what you can find in these hundreds of masking layers you are producing everyday is experimental/modern art, ready to be published or hung on a wall in a museum.
I am nice enough of a guy to post some of my masks here - please be sure to tell me when you hang them in your museum ;)

What I like about these images is the atmosphere. Because they are hand-drawn and mostly used to adjust highlights and shadows they have an airy feeling and are quite dynamic. Everything seems faded away but some ghost-like spots of some kind of landscape remain and the viewer has to imagine what the blackness around the white lines are, why these lines are still there and what they once were and are right now.

Maybe you can find a story in there somewhere!
(If you do, we would like to hear your impressions, so leave a comment!)
Even in times when you think you have seen it all and inspiration has to be found somewhere else, taking a step back and changing your point of view will get you back on your creative tracks!

Yours,
Manuel