I don't know how many of you guys look at the 2D gallery, but I've been having a look the last couple of days. After inspirational viewings, I've knocked up my first couple of 'graphic' images, rather than photo's....this is the second one. Comments and criticism are more than welcome.... Mike (",)

Very interesting composition :-) I kind of liked the repeating horizontal lines and their irregularity. There is one part, however that distracts me. There is a vertical pixelation somewhere on the lower right side, I wonder if it was done on purpose.

Man'O man where did you get those cool textures! Especially the carmel one and the wood one? How close were you to get the picture? Bsteph I know tou wanted a critique. Is there writing in the bottle watermark? If so can you make it stand out more? Hmm I like it, But it's so abstract. I like abstract things but it's hard to critique them. Can you make the dark wood texture look less pixelated? There is this squarish repitition within it. It just hit me. How many times did you resize or paste some of the images in ths? You may find using layers to be more usefull. Or even rubberstamping. Also consider softening the pixelted areas. Copying them. Making a new layer, Pasting it into the new layer then sharpening it several times then merging the two. I often use a merge of the top layer at about 70% It startening to make sense the more I look at it. How did you handle your problem?

Now you are really getting somewhere... IMHO I think that the techniques you are using are working well, and from a technical standpoint, this is really cool work that has a lot of talent and potential. From an emotional standpoint, I am not sure what to make of this. I am not getting any real meassage. Maybe it's just me, and I am not smart enough to understand what the image is saying.

Thanx Guys! Your comments are totally appreciated!! @Starshuffler - Yeah, it's deliberate. Initially it was to repeat more throughout the picture, but it didn't work out that way... @bsteph - those textures. Right: the initial picture has a head on it, I used the Shear filter to push her over to the right, thus creating the 'trail' across the screen, then copied the layer and 'liquified' the image to the right to erase her head with her hair trail - one deep wood effect! No, no writing - but i DO see what u mean! The only copying of sections was the dark wood after the button had been placed, which is set to about 35% opacity. The whole picture was a LOT redder than this, I had to halve the saturation to get this tone. What problem? I was just playing about! LOL @Alpha - see very last comment - in reality, I was trying to work out how Synapse produces his amazing effects (2D gallery) -which explains the wierd bit on the left. I took that out at one stage but the image looked empty on the left, so left it in. I also realised near the end it looked like a sun, moon and planets sort of thing so added the stars and removed the bottom of the 'sun'. Don't worry, I'm hyper-intelligent, and even I can't work out what THIS one means! LOL