Posted on December 17, 1999

• I’m working on one last Christmas pic (spirit hitting me late I guess). It’s isn’t very close to being finished, but I thought I would give you all an early look. It’s (tentatively) called “Snowball”, and it’s in the Picklejar. Click here for the thumbnail or here for the large size (1152 wide) image. Modeled and rendered in Lightwave (which has been collecting dust since I got World Builder). As you can see, I haven’t worked on the background yet…

Posted on December 16, 1999

• I added two different versions of “The Low Road” to the Pickle Jar. The first image like the one I posted yesterday, except that I removed the dusty haze. This was the version that Jessica said was too dark (see yesterday’s update below). The second image retains the atmospheric effects, but I “chopped down” the trees which had been surrounding the camera. It may be a case where less is more. What do you think?

Posted on December 15, 1999

• Where is my Christmas spirit? I meant to work on a happy holiday image these past couple days, but somehow that’s just not what came out. Recent security issues have taken their toll on my “good will towards men”. In fact, if it weren’t for Jessica I probably would have produced something much more dark and sinister. You have her to thank for the little dash of color I added to my latest offering: The Low Road. “It’s too dark Ryan,” she said, ” you should have made that at Halloween”. The Low Road is available in the Night Scenery gallery and in the WIP.

Posted on December 14, 1999

• By request I added 1600 x 1200 renders of Let it Snow and The Ride.

Posted on December 13, 1999

• I posted my Holiday Gallery on the free site. Nothing there that you haven’t seen before, except for maybe this poem that I composed to go along with my text for “Let it Snow”. One of my new year’s resolutions is to sit down and fully annotate every image in the member’s gallery (with more than just a few sentences on what software I used to make it).

  I’m still working on some new holiday images. To tide you over I’ve added a directory to the member’s gallery which I call simply “The Pickle Jar“. During the process of making one of the images you see in my galleries I usually go through three or four different revisions. Some of them are just plain bad and I won’t waste bandwidth or embarrass myself by showing them to you. Others were just a pixel or two away from making it into my gallery, but then something stoped me from posting it and went back and worked on it some more. The “Towers” images are a good example. They show off the towers that I later used to make up Gotham 1999 (I decided a city setting was more appropriate). Right now the Picklejar directory is unindexed (hence the name) and it contains 11 images. Check it out, and if you see an image that you think really belongs in my gallery, drop me a line.

  What’s the difference between these and a Work in Progress? A work in progress, when I post it, is an image that I feel is strong enough to make it into my gallery. Sometimes I’ll look at it later though and decide to make changes. I never planned on posting the images in the pickejar, but then it occurred to me that 1) they were doing no one any good sitting idle on my hard drive, and 2) sometimes an image that I don’t think is very strong turns out to be a favorite of others (Adrift is one example…).

  Like I said though, I’m working on some new stuff right now. Stay tuned!