Thanks guys

And an even more recent one

Ah well, that's easily done, though perhaps not the best pictures of her.

How very odd we have almost the same name. I've been here like, forever. Almost since the beginning. Trust me, the site now works a million times better than it did in the early days. Yes, I got mad once and took all my stuff down. But I missed the place. It was rather petulant of me and I regretted it quickly. Rosity is like, my art home on the web. I got started here, what with Bryce and Poser and PSP and worked my way up to Photoshop and Max and all, and now I'm fairly well known in many circles as a first rate artist. And, without a doubt, I owe a great debt to the people at Rosity who helped me. I love the place. I may not like all the changes but, hey, I ain't runnin the place and they don't bother me that much.

Oh, still in Texas, dadgummit, but I'm working on it. And my beautiful kitty, the smartest, most beautiful and weirdest Kitty in the world, Sarah, says hi. She looks a lot like Monster, the kitty you see to the left as my avatar here. Monster didn't live long. Sher was a genuine dwarf cat, and I was warned she wouldn't live long, but I had to have her. I couldn't bear to have a cat for a few years after she crossed the rainbow bridge, but a couple years ago one Christmas, Sarah and I rescued each other. She had been abused and abandoned outside my apartment building. She was terrified and meowing in distress and my ears can her a cat in distress a mile away, so I went out and got her and we fell in love instantly. She genuinely is beautiful, everyone who sees her says so. She is genuinely the smartest cat I have ever encountered, despite her obsession with knocking things off shelves and tables. And she is, no lie, an exceptionally weird cat. Outside, to her, is the hallways of my apartment building. Unfortunately, she also loves stairs She's absolutely terrified of the real outside. A remainder, I suppose, of her treatment before I got her. Somewhere in my gallery I believe there's a picture of her as a youngster. Anyway, I'm babbling, so keep on chooglin', y'all.

Sorry as hell I'm getting here late. That just sucks. I don't know what I'd do without my beautiful best bud Sarah. I'm all alone in life and since rescuing her as a tiny kitten, she's all I have. Lots of people don't understand the close relationship between people and their cats. But we do.

Thanks a million

I like Spam. The new Bacon flavor is very nice.

I use the old version, on both my Win XP pro machine and my Win 7 64 bit laptop. Works perfectly on both. Xenofex 2, and it does have Constellation Dunno why AS would stop supporting it. It's an excellent little plug in I use a lot.

I pretty much love anything Alien Skin does. They crazy, but they freakin geniuses.

Not really interested in a contest thing. Just wishing you luick on it. HPL is hard to make. I did do previz/concept/design on the indie flick Carnies, so I know how that goes. I was also the screenwriter. I also did a lot of art for a Lovecraft convention Last year or earlier this year hosted by Adam Nisswander who, unfortunately, we lost shortly thereafter. Painful to me, as he was a dear friend of many years standing. I also did 3 covers for his Shaman Cycle series.

I wish you luck and I hope you succeed so you can make a feature. It ain't easy being indie.

I recently stopped doing 3D CG completely, and changed my style to a kind of photo paint mashup painterly style. I do mostly book covers and consider myself an illuitrator rather than an artist, really. Well, writer and artist, really. But when other kids were growing up with classic artists, I was growing up an abused kid exploring the wold completely on my own, without limits. This led me to the classic and more modern illustrators, Maxfield Parrish, especially, and the preraphaelite painters.

I said that to paint this. What you want to do takes years of practice and experimentation. There's no pushbutton fix, nor do I expect you're looking for one. But I can give you some suggestions.

Learn to use every single doodad in Photoshop, from dithering to changing ther alpha to edge finfing to...everything. The various filters are ALL valuable, IF you learn to use them and, in my case, to often use them for things they weren't designedto do. Don't think of what you can do with them, think of it as can I use that to do this, even if no one's done it before and you aren't supposed to.

I find Alien Skin's various Eye Candy programs (Impact, Nature, Textures) expecially useful.

Also look for a package of free filters called Mehdi. I use these constantly, for everything.

Free filters and actions and such from the Adobe site are the bomb. If I want a particular object in an inage to be gold, I have an action for it.

I strongly suggest you spend mucho time learning to play with layers and using the multitude of blend options available. These are proably my most used tools and you can do a LOT with them once you understand how to use and misuse them. For example, off the top of my head, if you want a particular object or person in a photo tp stand out in some way, duplicate the layer, delete everything but the thing you wish to stand out, the apply the layer in whichever blend style you want at whatever opacity. I often select the object, duplicate it, gaussian blur it for about 5 pixels to expand it then apply it as overlay of luminosity, gives the image a more saturated, mystic, soft focus kind of glow.

Play with saturation and color balance. I tend to often cranck the saturation down jujst a wee bit. Phoptographs tend to see things a bit more saturated than the human eye does, so it boosts the 'reality' factor a bit. Or, I may oversaturate everything, adjusting the contrasta and balance as I go, of course.

Olay with the color balance and replace colors. Play with everything. Photoshop is a huge program, and every drawer has tools packed in them. Tools that most people never learn to use. Or if they do, the only use them for what the manual says to use them for. They don't experiment, mostly because Photoshop does take years to learn and can be pretty damned intimidating.

Never depend entirely on one program. WHile Photoshop is a foundation program for me, I also use Painter, another magnificent program that does things better than photoshop, expecially when it comes to blending edges and softening and such, or achieving a certain brush effect. I also use Paint Shop pro a lot, though these days it's mostly for browsing and photo correcting. I also use an old version of it before Adobe bought it and turned it into Photoshop Jr. I also use Corel Graphics Suite, which offers me a great number of options Photoshop doesn't or things it just does better than Photoshop. I also have a simple, free program I can't even remember the name of but what you can probably find on Sourceforge that does all on one thing. It turns photos into HDMI. And playing with HDMI is also a method I use, with layer apply, to get a more illustrative look. While I don't use Art Rage or Gimp, though both are layin around here somewhere, I am told by many people that both programs are truly excellent. I know Art Rage is used a lot in India and Asia.

The most difficult things for me to learn have been hair and shadows. I often use Alien Skin Eye Candy Fur plug in for hair, but it seems to have been been designed to make completely absurd hair or fake fur, so you have to learn to fiddle with it and learn to make peculiar selections and work from the bottom upo, but done well can make wonderful hair that, at the same time, looks illusstrative rather than photographic.  Shadows, well, again, this is where layer apply, especially multiply and opacity come in handy. Because if you put anything, person, anoimal, object, etc, in an image, it has to have a shadow that agrees in nature with the other shadows in the image. For people, unless the inage has crisp, well drfioned shadows that have to match, I most often use Eye Candy's perspective shadow tool, applied in a new layer underneath the subject (though yes, you can shuffle layers around) and then fiddle around with the shaps and size of the shadow to get something that's mostly under the subject or slightly to one side or another depending on lighting, then use multiply to apply it, then mess with the opacity until I get something that looks good. And that's all it needs to do.  The real purpse of shadows in art isn't just to reflect the direction of the lighting or break up the light and dark spaces. For what we do, shadows are the element that places THAT object solidly on the ground, planted, a part of the scene.

Now, go play, have fun and learn.

http://www.sourcepics.com/

Can't tell you in that one, I use 3D Max. My process is to repaint any template. Then I bring the object into Max. I click on the object to get whatever material is assigned to it, then import that material into the material editor and apply. With no UV mapping. Don't know if that helps at all. I'm not familiar with what other programs use.

I can't point you to a specific tutorial, but there are unimaginably many Photoshop tutorials on the net. Should be easy to find one. I don't remember where I found it, but I once downloaded a spectrum pattern, you know, like paint samples, all little boxes, of all the various possible skin shades, from white to Latino, to Asian, to Indian, to black. It's very helpful to have that reference. The rest is adding slight noise for pores and making the skin color uneven, because skin is not one consistent color. I add scars and tattoos by applying the image in layer mode and selecting multiply or overlay and adjusting the opacity. Makes it look more natural to me that way. The scars, I blur and blend the edges to make it blend in better. Wounds are harder, those take much work. Freckles are the hardest. To make the skin blotchy, find a grunge map that looks nice and random and blotchy, black and white. Apply that in multiply or overlay mode. Take the opacity down to zero, then start boosting it up until you achieve a nice blotchiness that isn't obvious or overbearing.