Posted on March 23, 2008

• Late Update: I’ve added a Pickle Jar version without the foreground figure. Personally I don’t think you get the same sense of scale without the person, but I’m all for providing options. Which do you prefer?

• Added “Moonshadow” to the gallery this morning. Sometimes working with clouds in Vue d’Esprit is easy and sometimes it can be very frustrating. I’ve been tweaking these for the past few days trying to get just the right look. At least the render times weren’t too bad (see my post below about hardware upgrades).

  Hope you like it!

• Since I asked people to post pictures of their computer setups on the DB Facebook page, it only seemed fair that I post my own. If you are interested in where I work you can check out a photo here.

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Posted on March 19, 2008

• The DB on Facebook page has been a real eye opener. All these years I’ve been looking at emails and comments from people, a lot of text, and now I can see human faces. While I know there are real people behind all of these emails I get, this makes it all seem more personal and real. Very cool.

  I had an idea that might make my Facebook page a little more interesting. I’m sure a lot of you out there have some wicked multi-monitor setups running my wallpapers. For a long time I’ve wanted to have a place where people could share photos of their workstations and it looks like the Facebook “Fan Photos” sections might fit the bill.

  I personally run only one monitor but I would love to see some of the multi-monitor (and cool single monitor) setups out there. If you would like to share your desktop with the world please feel free to post a photo of it in the “Fan Photos” section of the Facebook page. Thanks!

• Based on my experience rendering “Promise of Spring” (see post from 2/12) I’ve decided that I need to upgrade my hardware. Here’s my plan: I’ve purchased two Xeon 5365 (quad-core 3 GHZ) processors and 16 GB of RAM. These will go into my current machine, upgrading it from from 4 cores to 8 and 8 GB of RAM to 16. My dual-core processors and RAM will go into a new box that I am building from scratch on which I hope to use to render projects while I work on new stuff on my main machine.

  Back to work on my new wallpaper now…

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Posted on March 18, 2008

• Wanted to post an update here since it’s been some time since my last wallpaper. I am currently working on something new which I hope to have up before the end of the week.

  Last evening Jessie, Ian and I had dinner with an old friend of mine from High School that I’ve only recently gotten back in touch with. We got to talking about how he had used Facebook to find some our old mutual friends and that got me thinking that maybe I should get with the times and create a profile for myself.

  So while waiting for some test renders to finish this morning I went ahead and posted a profile for myself and one for Digital Blasphemy on Facebook. Hopefully this will give me some new ways to touch base with some of you who enjoy my work. Feel free to stop by and leave a comment (perhaps tell me some ways I can make better use of my profile page). I’ve been online for more than fifteen years now but this is my first crack at “social networking”. We’ll see how it goes!

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Posted on March 11, 2008

• Last year I was approached by New Age star David Helpling about using one of my images for his latest album cover. He wanted to use one of my favorites, Cathedral. The album, “Treasure“, was released last summer and was a big success.

  I just learned this evening that it won the NAR Lifestlyle Award for Best Cover Art of 2007, beating out some really incredible work. Believe it or not this is the first time one of my images has won any kind of award.

  Even though they don’t credit me on the web site (I’m credited in the CD) I’m still pretty proud of it and wanted to let you all know.

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Posted on March 6, 2008

• I’ve added the dual and triple screen versions of “Lone Tree” to the gallery this evening. Thanks everyone for the wonderful feedback. I knew Jessie is usually (almost always) right and the bulk of the comments bore that out. I’m glad that so many of you seem to enjoy the piece!

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