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For those of you who haven’t had a chance to see this yet, it is a contemporary interpretation of The Garden of Earthly Delights, commissioned for the 500-year anniversary of Hieronymus Bosch’s death. Wish I could have seen the exhibition at the MOTI Museum in Holland when it all happened last year, I bet it was amazing.

PARADISE – A contemporary interpretation of The Garden of Earthly Delights from STUDIO SMACK on Vimeo.

Merry Xmas Eve, ya’ll; hope you and yours are together and enjoying the holidays this year. For the final image of this set I am using the Impressionist tool, which gives you a very Vincent Van Gogh kind of virtual painting. I will no doubt be posting more about this type of software soon, or at least the variations of it I have been playing with, once I figure out a bit more about how it all works together.

Quiet Train Impressionist
Quiet Train Impressionist

As I said, when we were at Steampunk unLimited earlier this year we took a lot of photos, and this time the same two pictures are being modified using two different tools from Painter Essentials. While the results of these two processes look similar when you look at the images they created, the parts of the original pictures which were enhanced were quite different. I suspect it is going to take me a while to learn what kind of image requires which tool to bring it to its best advantage, especially considering what its best advantage is will change depending on what I want to use it for. Computer wallpaper, animation background, and 3D model textures each have different ways of presenting the results, for example, with the first a static screen image, the second being shadowed and moved by the characters in the foreground, and the third changing continuously with both the camera viewpoint and the orientation of the scene lighting.

Abney Park Train
Abney Park Train
Quiet Train Illustration
Quiet Train Illustration

When we were at Steampunk unLimited earlier this year we took a lot of photos, and I am sure everyone will be shocked and surprised to learn many of them were taken on, in, or around steam powered locomotives. I took a few of those images and processed them through an art program, Corel Painter Essentials 5, which is the stripped down successor of their earlier package Paint It!. I wanted to share a few of those results, this time using the Colored Pencil Tool.

Abney Park Train Ride
Abney Park Train Ride
Quiet Train Colored Pencil Drawing
Quiet Train Colored Pencil Drawing

I thought I would post a few pictures of myself and a friend of mine hanging out on my Balloon House. I generally keep it parked a hundred meters above sea level somewhere above an island paradise. You have to love Virtual Reality environments like Second Life; they can be so whimsical.

My Balloon House, far
My Balloon House, far
My Balloon House, medium
My Balloon House, medium
My Balloon House, near
My Balloon House, near

In my book, it’s still the holidays until we hit New Years, so one more set of images is allowed. This time around it is the star at Seven Dials, and some more stars from just a few blocks away. Blocks is kind of a lose term in London, and any other city that is a thousand years old or better, I suspect. The place wasn’t exactly planed and designed, but just kind of grew there as people built stuff. So no two blocks are the same size, and roads rarely meet at 90 degree angles, which looks kind of strange to anyone who grew up in a city laid out on a grid. Seven Dials itself is a perfect example; 7 roads all intersect at a single circle, pretty much at the same angles as the points on that star, hence the name of the neighborhood.

SevenDials Star

More Stars