Personal

I work for Vision Express during the day and I have a very busy schedule in the evenings (5-a-side football (the Scrawns), rugby training (sometimes), trying to keep fit (not enough though) and 10pin bowling (league stuff honest), so this doesn't really leave me much time for spending with my fiancé Kelly Edwards although as she is the most important person in my life she deserves more of my time...and I try to give it.  We have known each other since 1992 but we only hooked up December 3rd 1999.  3 months later we got engaged.

I have relegated my computer art to the back burner so I don't produce as much work as I used to, but this is fine... I tend to fit in a little computer time in the mornings before I start work which usually gives me at least 45 mins and sometimes 2 hours to get my silicon fix (depends if we get up at 5 a.m., 6 a.m. or get a lie-in (?) 'til 6:30!)

What do I produce?  Well as far as my art goes I used to do a lot of pencil and pen drawing, landscapes, still life and fantasy / sci-fi drawings but August 1997 I finally got myself a 66MHz DX2 PC and a copy of Photoshop and Bryce 2 and I explored the realm of computer art in all its glory.  (I was really interested in fractal art at this time and had even written a Basic program to explore the Mandelbrot Set for my trusty BBC micro a couple of years before) I had been heavily inspired by the works of Pixar that I had seen in the late 80's and glimpses of computer generated artistry that TVs Channel 4 sometimes showed so I was eager to experiment myself but limited myself to static art and have only delved into the realm of animation in small doses with Bryce 3D.  I hope you find enough to interest you if you take the Gallery tour.

Enough about me... I know it's boring, sorry.

Software

I was using a P166 MHz PC with a 2 meg graphics card (no graphics accelerator).  I only had a 2 Gig hard drive and a second of only 600 Meg.  I had 64 meg of RAM.  Remember that a lot of my work was done on either my DX2 66 or later on my P100 before my computer found itself in this incarnation... patience was the key back then.

BUT we bought (back in December 2000) our new PIII 700Mhz which I instantly wapped up to 320Meg RAM so now Photoshop runs so fast I sometimes finish pieces before I have even started them!  Whoooooosh.  Scanner and 32meg ATI Rage 'graf-accel' welded on too so double-whooosh

SOFTWARE- this is probably done best in list format.  My machine has WindowsME as the OS.

PhotoShop 5.5 - The King among kings.  I have used PhotoShop since version 4 and I couldn't live without it.  It is still the most flexible image manipulation / creation software around and in my opinion will never be beaten.  I have used it for 4 years and I still have so much more to learn, you can do anything with it.  I use PhotoShop mostly for post-render work (tweaking, fine-tuning, applying effects and general touching-up) but I also use it create skins and textures for materials in Bryce or, on a different slant, for producing multi-layered works from scratch.  Very impressive, thankyou Adobe.

Bryce 5 - What can I say about this particular gem?  If you're looking to produce landscapes with atmospheric effects or surreal fantastic vistas then this is the ap for you.  It is so easy to use (after the slight orientation needed with the display (love or hate - you choose)).  A set of primitives allows you to Boolean-model a huge number of things and Bryce will import DXF files along with a range of other formats.  If used carefully (lighting, fog, haze and realistic textures) then you can create wonderful images that can be mistaken for pix from other software that would've cost 8 to 10 times more.  Not quite photo realistic but close, at times.  I love this ap but then I've grown with it from Bryce 2.  It really is easy to use and with practice can be stunning (although I'm nowhere near the caliber of some out there - see my links page).  For the price range it can only be classed as the best.

Illustrator 8 - This is the vector graphics program that I use to make all my...er...vector graphics.  The control you can get with the pen tool in this ap can let me create complex line drawings or fonts that can be cut and pasted directly into PhotoShop and then (because they're Vector based) resized and then rendered.  For example, take a look at the 3 pictures on this page (the house below and the computer and boy & girl above).  All 3 were created in Illustrator.  Sweet.

Poser 3 - A really good program for making people (and a few animals) to populate your scenes.  Especially good when you need someone in the distance on the beach for example.  With proper use of lights and textures, close ups needn't look kinda plastic (and even if the people you create do look as though they have that "sheen" then a little post production in, you guessed it, PhotoShop can make them seem real enough)

Fractal Extreme - This is the (shareware) program that I use for getting those infamous pretty looking pix from the edge of infinity that is the border of the Mandelbrot set.  But I also use it for purely personal pleasure...it can be eerily beautiful zooming into an area of the Mandelbrot set and realizing that after only 20 zooms or so (and I think the prog will go down to 50,000 plus zooms but you might need a CRAY at this level) you are very probably seeing structure that has never been seen before by any human that has ever existed... weird, but soooooo cool and with color cycling sooooo beautiful (oh and you can make cool movies from your few minutes explorations)

I am now trying to crack on and learn Blender (this is a free 3D software ap that is of similar quality (as far as rendering out scenes that you have just modelled from scratch) to its big brothers such as Lightwave (in fact it has been referred to as the 'poor-mans' Lightwave 3D (and it costs £1,800 less than the £1,800 lightwave prog)). As soon as I produce anything other than tests then I will let you see the results.

Form-Z (for every now and then modeling something - excellent export formats), Flarium 24 (another fractal prog worth having a look at) and trusty old Word (for creating text docs to insert into scenes).

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