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.

The Depths is one of my earlier wallpapers, created about the same time as cybernetic and lifeless. The render was created in Cinema4d and came out of the same rendering set that I used to create Blood Splatters Pink and a couple other submissions, most of the work here however was done in Adobe Photoshop. The render itself has no texturing done to it, it was exported and then I did some heavy brushwork to highlight some of the characteristics I wanted to show. Honestly I just kinda like the way it was balled up, I’m not sure where the name came from, probably because when I started coloring I went with blue. The main feature of this wallpaper I think is probably the tech work, which I still think is some of my best, at the time I was doing a lot of tech work, I felt I was very good at it and wanted to use it as a major part of my wallpapers.

I really don’t have a lot of back story to go with this one, even though on DeviantART it’s actually one of my most +fav’d submissions. Pretty much I had this render, which I did in Cinema4D, it’s from a set I did which I used for a lot of my wallpapers of this period. I really liked how it flowed and I didn’t want to put any kind of texture on it or do any heavy brushing to it. I decided a splatter backing it would work (something I had experimented with before on an earlier wallpaper and liked) but didn’t want to do something dark so I played around with the colors for awhile and decided on pink. After that I threw in a motion blur behind that and a nice glossy finish on top of everything. It’s really a pretty simple wallpaper,. not much involved with it at all but I guess it captures my favoritism of minimalism.

To anyone that really knows me it should come at no surprise how big of a Smashing Pumpkins fan I actually am. A few years ago I began to become interested in doing vector artwork, right about the same time as I was coming out of being interested in space scenes. I did a few small anime based vectors, stuff that would be easy to kinda learn myself. Once I was pretty confident that I could do a larger composition I decided that I would do a series of Smashing Pumpkins vectors, and although in the end I only ended up completing the one I’m to this day still very happy with it. For those unaware Billy Corgan is the Smashing Pumpkins so it is kinda fitting that I only ended up completing his vector. It was done completely in Photoshop, and is named after one of my favorite acoustic songs from the Aeroplane Flies High box set. Who knows maybe some day I will complete this series, with the new band members instead of the old.