Solstice

Posted on December 20, 2021

Once a month I get up before dawn and drive Jason to school to meet with his classmates. One recent foggy, frosty morning the sunrise was peeking through the trees in our neighborhood and the contrast of the deep red and the cold morning really struck a chord with me. I knew I wanted to recreate it in VUE.

Now that the family is home for Winter Break I plan on spending as much time with them (especially Ian) as possible. By this time next year Ian will be away at college and my life will be very different.

I hope you have enjoyed my work in 2021 and that you all have a safe and happy holiday!

Yuletide NFT Collection

Posted on December 17, 2021

To start with, my Christmas wallpapers can be found here. NFTs are very new and I doubt many artists have minted Christmas work yet. I’ve created so many over the years that it seemed like an opportunity to share something unique with the digital art world. Foundation now allows you to group works in a Collection and that seems perfect for my Christmas art. I have no idea if there’s a market for this sort of thing or not, and that’s why I am posting it here on my site where I haven’t really marketed these things very much.

Those of you not interested in NFTs will find my entire Christmas gallery here. I’ve added “Snowglobe(Fluorescence)” to the Free Gallery and may add one or two more as Christmas approaches 🙂

Onyx Daisy

Posted on December 15, 2021

I knew when I set about creating the “Iridescent Daisy” that I wanted to try one more. I’d tried a black daisy before but I’d never managed to get it right. It’s still elusive but this is as happy as I’ve ever been with the project and feel satisfied 😉

Iridescent Daisy

Posted on December 13, 2021

When most folks hear “NFT” nowadays they are thinking of “Bored Apes” or “CryptoPunks”. Those are so called “PFP Projects” (Profile Pic Projects) that generate 10,000 “unique” creatures and then crypto-millionaires buy them for lots of money to use for their Twitter Avatar.

I don’t do that kind of work. I create 1/1 art (single edition). Each of my renders is created “by hand” on on my workstation. I’m making the creative decisions that go into each piece rather than letting the computer generate each one. Still, I do have certain projects where I’ve done a small number of color or time-of-day variations that would fit the definition of an “NFT Collection”. I did a test with my “Winterborn” snowflakes and they sold quickly.

I have always thought my “Daisy” series would be a good candidate for a collection and it’s now live on Foundation. The “Sunburst” and “Inverse” of them have sold already. I also thought it would be fun to add at least one brand new daisy to the series and here it is…the “Iridescent Daisy”. It would have been easier to do something basic and more monochrome (like the 2002 versions) but I wanted to try something different. I hope you enjoy it. Might try one more…

Christmas Walk

Posted on December 7, 2021

As soon as I’d made the winter iteration in the “Walk” series I wondered if I Christmas version would be possible. I knew I wouldn’t be able to use actual geometry for any Christmas lights here though, because VUE doesn’t let you use ecosystem instances on objects that are already ecosystem instances (in this case, the forest). I had to do it by modifying the bark textures and that’s something I’d never attempted before on this scale.

It presented many challenges and I’m still not sure I’m totally happy with the result. I am happy ENOUGH however to share this render and perhaps keep tweaking things. I haven’t rendered the multiscreen version yet for this reason. It’s definitely different from my other Christmas scenes. Let me know what you think!

Honestly I had hoped DB 2.0 would be the default by this point but it’s taking longer than I’d hoped. DB 1.0 has served for many years however and will continue to do so until no longer needed.