For the first time in a very long time I had two days off last weekend. A momentous occasion that opened up a whole host of opportunities.

Those opportunities included cooking, baking, video games and art.

Over the last few years I’ve started dedicating more and more of my spare time to digital photo manipulation — creating original pieces using stock images or parts within those images. Mostly, what I create are fantasy scenes or science fiction scenes. I’ve talked about this in previous articles. If you’re new to my column, ask Reader No. 8 and she’ll tell you how it takes away from the often brutal reality of world we slog through these days.

For hours at a time I can go up to my computer at home, sit down in front of it and begin pulling together a fictional scene of where I would rather be than this one these days.

And so, all excited like, I went home a couple days ahead of this most anticipated moment after work, opened up my new and fancy laptop, finally purchased after all these years of saying I would — annnndddddd … nothing.

I looked through my poorly sketched ideas, hammered out in detail. I read through my journal. Yes, I have a journal, but it’s filled with ideas and not who I have a crush on. Anyway, I paged through my journal where I have composed fictional worlds and galaxies, hoping something there would lend me an idea.

Nothing came to me and I started to panic a little. What if I lost my creativity?

I will admit I’ve lost a bit of that over the last year or so for various reasons, but I always thought that once I started to create something then it would come to me, but try as I might, nothing came even remotely close. Hashed-out ideas seemed shallow and, even worse, anything I put to screen looked very amateur.

Don’t scoff at me using that word in that way. I understand that I’m not the best artist in the world. I have not done something so impressive that allows me to stand in a gallery, wearing a beret and opining of the futility of life and how I strove to harness that futility in this piece you’re looking at.

I don’t think I’ve opined once in my life. I’ve thought long and hard on something, flirted dangerously close with lamentation, but never so much as even allowed myself I was good enough to opine about anything.

So, I’m really not so good as all of that, but in that moment, sitting at the dining room table, I felt like the most amateur amateur that ever amateured.

When I first started doing these types of pieces in the form of my first athlete pieces for our All-Herald sports teams, I was bad. I look back every so often at those images and feel a mixture of emotions ranging from, “I’ve come a long way” and “that, is really, really bad.”

It’s a way of rooting (grounding) myself and never allowing myself the idea that I might become too big for my britches. Arrogance is never my thing, probably because I’ve never been good enough at any one thing to be arrogant. Believe me, sometimes I think I might want to be arrogant, but then I see how well my mom and dad did at raising me to be nice and I think, nah.

Is that poor parenting?

I gave it a day and tried sketching some poorly-conceived idea in the Bingo-ball twirling mess that was my mind and nothing so much as a new planet came to my mind. I tried listening to various kinds of music to see if anything popped up and went through my whole assortment of stock images to see if I had anything that could even pass as a starting point.

Nothing so mundane as a mountain chain and a moon revealed itself. First, I was depressed by this. Secondly, I was angry and frustrated and finally, I just gave up and walked around the house, sullen, afraid that any creative spark went out the door and I was ultimately going to be lost in the dull day- to-day that my life was becoming.

Holy cow. I’m an ARTIST!

Seriously though, it was a momentary thing. One of the sketches in my sketch book revealed itself to me and in about three hours I had something I was relatively happy with. It’s put on hold right now because I need another stock image to complete it.

Here’s the real reason why it suddenly clicked.

On that Sunday, as I said, I went to my computer, turned on the companion tablet that we draw on and stared. As before, nothing really materialized though I could see it was the piece I wanted to work on. The ideas were there; I just needed a catalyst. Music, I needed music. Connecting with YouTube I searched and couldn’t find anything that would put me in the mood. And then, there it was. A shining beacon of big hair and fluffy clouds. A man whose optimism captured such heights as to be unreachable even by the most devout man of God. A man who saw a world in such a way as to be devoid of mistakes — only “happy accidents.”

Bob Ross.

I watched one episode of the public television artist as he guided painters through a scene of a secluded meadow. I watched another where we climbed the heights of the almighty mountain — and gradually the idea materialized more and more, until I was working on my own work as Bob introduced us to Peepod the Pocket Squirrel. Bob Ross was the catalyst.

So you see kids, creativity comes and goes. What matters is Bob Ross is forever.