I don't know what kind of art I'm making and heading for. It's definitely headed somewhere. Into the wilderness of Sabi maybe, the beauty of age and decay. Some may ask why I don't often put people in my images. It's because I like a sense of life interrupted. One knows people have been there, and will be there, but for that single moment, life stands still. And I've always had this vision in my head of nature taking over. This was inspired by a not very good snapshot of an old wooden stairway behind a college somewhere in San Francisco. The original concept was a challenge I set for myself. I do that, to push myself, to learn, to improve my art. The challenge was to take a very mundane scene and make it...mystical. The stairway intrigued me for no clear reason. There was just something about it that compelled me. I made it my own and then just kept adding bits and pieces. I was very hard to satisfy on this one. The picture inspired the title when I was about halfway through, and then it got harder since I then had to make a piece of art that would match the title, rather than just the lost stairs I was originally doing. I'd add something, and it still didn't look finished, it didn't feel complete. So I had to keep going until it felt right. It took me about a month all in all. It's a weird kind of still life, almost classical in a sense. Neglected life, forgotten life. Why the Wing Chong signboard? I dunno. Ever read Stienbeck? Just seemed to fit. And sure, I could have made the butterfly a pretty one, but it didn't want to be pretty. It wanted to be what it was. I was also experimenting with a post processing style called silvering. I didn't invent it, but as far as I know, I'm the first to try emulating it in Photoshop. It's an old movie film post process. It's subtle, but I really like what it does. I have to experiment more to get it perfect. The ground is a displaced mesh with a texture composited and blended in Max from multiple textures I made. I still have trouble getting good ground textures. The rest is plants. One of the hardest parts was in making all the foliage the same tonal values, so everything matched. The ivy is an opacity mapped and displaced plane, a technique I'm still experimenting with. When it works, it works really well. When it doesn't, it sucks.