The background is a scan of a photo of some ivy leaves growing on the ground, and then seriously retouched in Corel PhotoPaint- probably in all about 20 or so layers at varying transparencies of the same image using different filters and color, tone, and other special effects. It was originally made for my Rose character. I like to make these "impressionist" style backgrounds and I use the same basic technique on all of them. Here is another background image of the same sort that you might find interesting- it happened quite by accident and originally began life as a photo of my back yard. I sort of went wild for a moment with cutting, sizing, rotating, and pasting different shaped strips of the image back onto itself over and over again, and then suddenly I saw this myriad of Green Man faces staring back at me... the more and the deeper you look into the image, the more Green Man faces you can see, much like a fractal image in that regard. They appear in every direction. Obviously this is a very magical image, and I call it my "Fractal Green Man" =};-}> (680x680 pixel hi-res JPG 254K bytes) Fractile Green Man