One of the questions I get all the time from people is "Where do you get your ideas?". It's also one of the toughest questions to answer. Just where do ideas come from after all? They pop into your head seemingly out of nowhere and can be abundant one day and elusive the next.

The idea for my recent "Green and Gold" wallpaper came to me when I was taking a walk. I had been working on a space image which was going nowhere and needed a breath of fresh air.

I was walking through my neighborhood looking at the trees and trying to think of how I could work out this space picture when all of a sudden I thought back to a movie Jessie and I had watched a few nights previous.

The movie was Hayao Miyazaki's "My Neighbor Totoro". It's a wonderful film that I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone. I can recall being very impressed with the huge tree that Totoro called home and, as I was walking, I wondered if I could achieve something similar.

I shelved the space image when I got back home and set to work on a "Totoro Tree" of my own. It was obvious from the start that I wouldn't be able to replicate the height of the tree, since the film panned up to show it and I was creating a still (and a widescreen still at that).

I put the tree together first (going more for width and complexity than height) then decided that it would look best by itself in a wheatfield.

The end result doesn't really evoke "My Neighbor Totoro" at all, but I wouldn't have had the idea if I hadn't watched the movie.

Such is the strange nature of inspiration I guess. I'm sure I will still get more questions on where I get my ideas, but at least now I have a link to respond with ;-)