Ultramodern is sort of alone in a sense, at least how it relates to the other work in my portfolio. When I created this wallpaper I was really experimenting with a lot of different styles and a lot of different programs, Ultramodern is the result of one of those experimentation session. This wallpaper was created in Bryce 5, a lesser known and less powerful 3D modeling software. The reason I liked Bryce is because it had some really nice textures and tools to apply said textures. This is basically a bunch of oval rings with glass like textures bunched and then a zoom out in perspective. The result was something that reminding me of the tubes you see in sci-fi movies, so that’s where the name comes from.

Ah the first redesign of Create, which happened probably a good 3 months or so into it’s life, which was about the norm for a redesign for the site, every few months or so. This version was a big shift from the original design, but still somewhat minimal. As I recall I went through about three concept designs before I ended up with this one, I picked a few things from each of them and together they kinda fused into the final layout (I still have the concept designs, I will upload them at some point). Looking back I’m very fond of the content area of this layout, it was the first time I had done avatars this way, something that would be a staple of my layouts for about 6 months. It also blends very well, perhaps a little more color would have been nice. Also I’m still very disappointed with the upper area and banner for this layout, as I recall I had a lot of trouble fitting something into the design and it shows, I wish I would have spent more time on it and perhaps version 3 would have been vastly different then what it ended up being.

I promised before when I posted my Beauty Inside submission that I would later post some of the other things I did with it. The most notable is this layout for Synthetic Art. At the time this was probably my boldest attempt at leaving MSN Groups for a true .com. SynArt was a step along with many of my pals from create to get out there (this happening right after our group Createv2 was hacked and taken over). Overall it really did ok, a lot of the members from MSN Groups followed us to the forums at SynArt and all in all while we were there it was a good time. However, work in the .com was hard and while I had previous experience this was the first time I was really trying to do more than I understood. I spent a lot of hours during this time playing around with php code snippets, installing software, etc and it allowed me to build up enough skill that later on down the road I would be able to build dbzrenewedfaith.com and then after the closing of MSN Groups my crowning achievement CPN. Stylistically it’s a pretty simple layout, but very clean, it would go on to be used again for Pokemon Concept.

This is a really early submission of mine, at least early in terms of when I started to really form my own style and started experiment with techniques that I would use even to this day. Angel Wings came out of the same time period and development sessions as the wallpaper Lifeless and is pretty much the same exact style, just on a smaller canvas. In fact this was the first thing I did in this style, it would actually lead to me making Lifeless. Angel Wings was created entirely in Photoshop 7, I used a technique where I would use the pen tool to draw out the basic forms I wanted to have then I’d apply varying wave and blur effects to the layers (which I would usually duplicate several times and then vary the opacity of each layer creating an overlaying/flow effect). The brushwork was also a new thing for me here, I had done a good deal of brushing before, but here I finally got the ‘grunge’ feel down.

Beauty Inside is kind of a special piece for me, and it’s one that I’ve pulled from and used for different things on several occasions. I think the real showcase here is with the brushwork, up until this point (I had done several wallpapers with heavy brushwork, but I was still learning the ropes and figuring out what my style was going to be) I hadn’t really stuck a brushwork portion of a submission, this was the first one I felt like I really got exactly right, just the way I had envisioned it. I really put in a lot of work on the color palette as well, I wanted this one to really convey it’s point. Beauty Inside would go on to have a wallpaper form (I’ll try to find this and upload it later), It was the basis for the Synthetic Art layout and theme (Again, I’ll find this and upload it later), and finally a edited form ended up becoming a wallpaper I titled sanitarium which is in stark contrast the look and feel of the original design (I’ll upload this one as well). The work was done in Cinema4D and mostly in Adobe Photoshop 7.

Lifeless is a pretty significant wallpaper to me, it was the first really serious piece of artwork I ever did. Not to say it was my first wallpaper as I had been dabbling in the medium for awhile before Lifeless but up until that point I was really just learning the ropes. As a statement though Lifeless also means a lot to me personally, as it represents a pretty tough period in my life and was a major help getting though it. Lifeless was created completely in photoshop, and still to this day probably is the wallpaper I spent the most time working on, 10s of hours went into the brushwork (probably because at the time I didn’t really know what I was doing and there was a lot of trial and error) and I think it shows!

Create was one of the biggest and best things I ever did on MSN Groups, as a community it opened in the summer of 2005, in fact just about this time 7 years ago. Before I joined the Create team I was working on some RPGs but I had largely removed myself from the greater community, Create was my chance to get back into the game and make a place for myself again. Over the next 3 some odd years Create thrived as a community, we went through 11 different designs, 4 different groups, and a .com of sorts. In the end everything went to shit, but that’s how community sites always end so that was to be expected, but during my time as a member of the Create team we did some pretty awesome things and this layout was the start of all of them.

This is an old one, I think I originally created this wallpaper in 2005 and if I remember correctly it was for a GFX Battle which I won, on create I believe. Dream of Change as I called it was meant to reflect my vision of a neuron firing off during a dream, but clearly there is more to it than just that core concept. The render was created in 3D Studio Max 7, and honestly is pretty poor but I liked the shape of it. It had no texture to it and all the post work was done in Photoshop, displaying some of my early brushwork. I’m still pretty fond of this one, it takes me back, though clearly I was just starting out doing bigger pieces like this one.