Recent events have me going through my work, evaluating what kinds of things I should be working on and how to develop a portfolio for something more than just my own fun. This got me re-opening something I first worked on in April of 2010, during one of my experiments with potential textures for my space craft and such. I got stuck fairly often, but not because I wasn't making interesting things, but rather they weren't very good for use as hull-plating or such. At any rate, I was looking at this, and then looking at an advertisement here on Renderosity for one of the many steampunk-inspired things that are to be found in the marketplace here. I wish I could remember which ad it was, alas I only saw the banner and didn't even click on it to see more. The textures got me thinking, and then I made a radical turn on this pattern. The results surprised me to no end, but I'm rather pleased with how it looks. If you're curious, the pattern started out in Adobe Illustrator. Simple Hex-shapes with a radial gradient. Overlaying them was a series of rectangles with a simple linear gradient. From there we go to Photoshop, where I had a couple of copies of the pattern in separate layers, with various filters (Distortions, noise, the like) and while it looked good, it wasn't quite what I wanted. So I flattened what I had, then duplicated it to a new layer, colorized the whole thing as a simple monotone, and then used the Ink Outlines filter to strengthen the boundaries, etc. Blend the two layers and here we are. I must remember this trick in the future, it's got some real potential!