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PLEASE ZOOM IN FOR THE BEST VIEWING

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Thank you so much for visiting my gallery today. It is the Christmas season at last. For me the holidays really do not begin until this weekend - about two-and-a-half weeks before the big day - grey and drizzly though it is today. Yet, I do have about half of my shopping done so I lie a little. I love the Christmas season. Let's face it, it is the only time of the year when any of us put some style into our home decor. And standing at the heart of this most colourful time - the Christmas tree. Don't ever suggest to me that we don't need a Christmas tree to celebrate Christmas - if you know what's good for ya. I got a lot of such minimalist talk from my teachers in grade school, but I am Sagittarius after all. So I have my Christmas tree up - ahead of schedule this year. I love Christmas lights you see and it's hard to resist once December actually starts. Of coarse our tree is decorated to my spouse's specifications - amber lights with a few slow blinking white lights up the centre. It is beautiful, looks terrific and Lilly loves it as her new hiding spot, but it is not my idea of how a Christmas tree should look. I grew up at a time of no pesky mini-lights, when every bulb on the tree - truly grand Noma bulbs - was a beckon of individuality to be treated with all the reverence bestowed upon a star in the night sky. Back in the day, we knitted the strings into the branches of the tree. Thus lights were viewed at various depths and illuminated much more of the interior. Quite a bit of labour, which I still do today with the mini-lights, and worth it. But back then I would next spend happy hours switching the coloured bulbs from one location to another balancing the tree's "colour palette" - a-hem. Most colours could be used as freely as desired. Save yellow which was much brighter than the others so had to be deployed sparingly - too much yellow was, well- too much. In the end, with all the other balls and ornaments added, the tree took on the feel of a self contained cosmos. Perhaps a nebula of stellar formation if you will. Something a visitor might enjoy exploring with their eyes and many actually did. Alas, I do not get deploy my craftsmanship any longer, not in the real world anyways. But in an act of rebellion befitting the spirit of the season, I fire up my Vue software and build my own Christmas tree. Tall, snowy, proud and bejeweled with every colour I can cram onto its virtual branches. A very cathartic act may I say. A bit like a primal (but nice) scream in the heart of a pine forest. Oops! did I just say that? Okay, lets cool off in all this snow I've supplied. And let me tell you something. It is quite a challenge to cover Vue ecology trees in snow. First you have to figure out how to access their material settings - a bit obscure. But then, unlike Poser, you can not directly blend a colour node with a mathematical or fractal node. I use the fractal patterns to define the placement of snow deposits on the branches. A fractal node must be pumped through a "Colour Map" node - where's the web page for that trick? Then you can blend it (with a blender node) with another colour node such as the colour map for the evergreen needles of the tree. What a mess, but it did finally work. But enough of my holiday ranting. I hope everyone is having a wonderful weekend and thoroughly busy decorating their homes in bright primary colours. As we say in Canada, there aught to be a law. Cheers!

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