A second honeymoon after only three years of married life

On September 21, I and my wife will celebrate three happy years of married life. We’ve actually been together much longer, and yet the honeymoon is not over. In fact, we agreed that our recent road trip vacation to Georgian Bay, Tobermory, Manitoulin Island, Thunder Bay and more was something of a second honeymoon for us.

We snorkelled, diving down on shipwrecks. We swam in crystal clear waters, hiked for miles through forests and across cliffs, even did a little adventure caving. We travelled on glass-bottomed boats and climbed observation towers. We swam in a waterfall, which is where the photo below was taken. And those are just a few of the bullet points. Along the way we stayed in campgrounds, motels and State Parks, staying one step ahead of the heatwave affecting the rest of Ontario all the way. And the wonderful thing about Canada is this: The more you see, the more you want to see.

The trip was around 3,200km, which by our standards is a short hop – our actual honeymoon was 5,800km – but in between 8 hour driving sessions we managed to cram in lots of fun, as well as have time for rest and relaxation. We even managed to visit an Amethyst mine, and picked up some pieces of geological history for the house.

Three years. We’ve done a lot, my love and I. And we plan to do a whole lot more in the next three. Six. Nine… Watch this space.

Happy Anniversary, my love. Here’s to many, many more.

A second honeymoon after only three years of married life.

Life. Funny thing, life.

One year ago today, our good friends Juice and Sweets (Brad and Kim) were married in a beautiful biker ceremony on a fantastic, sunny day. Surrounded by those they love, and by those that love them. It was a beautiful day. Here is the video I made for them.

It was a good day.

On the same day, Nikki and I were waiting to hear whether our offer had been accepted on the house in which we now live. Obviously, it was. During their vows, we got the call. I had muted the phone. Three buzzes while I fumbled the phone from my pocket, and the house was ours! High five and a quiet happy dance, while our friends sealed the deal with a kiss.

Five minutes after that, while we were still happy dancing, I got another call. Literally, five minutes. A lot can happen in five minutes.

That call told me that my 15 year old grandson had died in a tragically avoidable accident. He had been electrocuted while climbing on freight trains. Kyle lost his life while his cousin Cameron performed CPR until the ambulance arrived. While his brother Liam ran for help, Cam kept Kyle going until cousin Kayleigh, Kyle’s sister, came running. Together they kept the CPR going and fought on. Never give in. Never surrender. They didn’t.

But sadly, some fights just cannot be won.

Did I mention, this tragedy struck on Cameron’s 16th birthday?

Today is Cameron’s 17th birthday.

One year on. I’m wishing you a Happy Birthday, Cam, even though I know you don’t want to celebrate it. Rather, Cam has arranged to meet friends and family at a local park to release balloons in remembrance of Kyle.

That says a lot about Cameron. I can’t imagine what he (and the rest of the family, particularly Liam and Kayleigh) went through that day, and during this last long year. Or how they and the rest of the family have coped. One fractured day at a time.

I want to wish Juice and Kim a happy first anniversary. I want to wish Cam a happy birthday, whether he wants me to or not. And I want to mourn Kyle. Honestly, I can’t claim to have known him, and I won’t. I left the UK a long, long time ago when he was only a boy. But I do know this. Kyle left a huge hole. The entire family has been rocked by his untimely death. And no parent should ever have to bury a child. That’s not the way it is supposed to be.

A wedding. A new life. A life lost. All in five minutes. Five. Minutes. On that same day, there were thousands of births and deaths and marriages. Millions of happy and unhappy events. That day, and every day since. And every future day, too. The world keeps turning.

What is the point of all this? I’m getting to that. The point is this. It’s neither all good, nor all bad. In the midst of life we are in death, it’s true.  Enjoy the good, and smile through the tears. There is much pain in this world, balanced, usually, by much joy.

The trick is to never give up. Never surrender. Love while you can. And live. Live and love as though there is no tomorrow. Because one day, there won’t be. And then, the good memories will help get you through. You will need those memories.

So, make some. Go and hug someone. For no reason. Just do it. Put a smile on another person’s face. It feels good. Really. Give yourself, and someone else, a happy memory. Do it. Right now.

Or at least, within the next five minutes.

For Kyle Bradley.
For Kyle

The Weight of Snow Varies

According to the esteemed University of North Dakota (and who am I to argue with such academic giants?) the light and fluffy snow that we like to make snow angels in and make home movies of our dogs plowing through can mass around 7 US pounds per cubic foot. More average, denser snow, can come in at 15 pounds per foot, while drifted snow is denser still, since it is compacted (think snowman) and can come in at 20 pounds per cubic foot or more. I’m going to take 17 pounds per cubic foot as my base for this calculation, since it involves both drifted snow and snow which had been compacted by that most fearsome of the mechanized beasts of Winter, a municipal snow plow. We love them.

From the rear of my car to the road on this particular day was only about 50 feet. My driveway is a ballpark average of 10 feet wide. 500 square feet. The sidewalk, which one must clear by law in case some otherwise intelligent passerby slips and sues you, is 40 feet across the front of the house by 3 feet in width, adding another 120 square feet. The car itself had a foot of snow on the roof and packed under the wheels too, but let’s not quibble over details and just go with what we have: 620 square feet of snow to clear.

At the rear of my car, the snow was a foot deep. Now, we’re talking cubic. Car to road is 50 feet by 10 feet by 1 foot, total 500 cubic feet. Sidewalk, 120 square feet. If we say it was a foot deep at all points that’s another 120 cubic feet of snow. Close enough.

snowclearanceThere’s more. At the roadside, the snow was nearer 2.5 feet deep (probably more, I’m rounding down) due to the plow (blessed be those that driveth them).

The snow sloped evenly between the rear of the car and the road due to drifting, and of course the entire road frontage was one solid block where the plow had passed. This is where that algebra you learned in school kicks in (ha! The joke is on you if you thought you would never need it, kids!) and we calculate the slope. Easy enough. See diagram. 🙂

We take the volume of an imaginary rectangle and divide by two, to get the volume of the slope area separately. (50 x 10 x 1.5) / 2, gives us an extra 375 cubic feet.

Now we add. 375 cubic feet of slope, plus 500 cubic feet on the driveway, and 120 cubic feet on the sidewalk. Ignore the car! That gives a total amount of snow on the sidewalk, and between car and road, of 995 cubic feet of wet white stuff. Are you with me so far?

The last calculation is simple. At a conservatively estimated 17 pounds of snow per soggy wet cubic foot, I shoveled 995 cubic feet of snow. A total of 16,915 US pounds. There are 2,000 pounds in a US ton. The math says that I shoveled over eight tons of water yesterday. That seems impossible, right?

Please, check my math. Tell me if I’m wrong, but I checked it a few times because I didn’t believe it myself. I think you’ll find it accurate. No wonder snow clearance is a leading cause of heart attack and sudden death in Canada. That’s a lot of water to move.

I definitely learned something today. I learned that I will park closer to the road next time.

Getting Clean, With A Little Help From our Friends

January 29 marks the release of a David Bowie tribute issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Following Bowie’s death on January 10, a great many artists spoke of the influence this controversial musician had made on their lives, their musical choices and their careers. That in itself is inspirational.

But it goes much deeper. Beyond the musical influence, beyond the stardom and the Fame (I had to get at least one Bowie song reference in somewhere), Bowie himself has a well-documented history of drug abuse and was well along the path to self-destruction as far back as the Ziggy Stardust days of the seventies.

There are many stories of wild excesses and behaviour that follow the traditional rock star pattern. But unlike many others that were chewed up and spit out by the intensity of living their lives in the media spotlight, Bowie somehow turned it around and came out the other side, stronger than ever.

showtime five years david bowie smA quick Google search for ‘Bowie saved my life’ returns page after page after page of stories of fans attributing their current happiness to this much missed musician and the meaning they perceived from his body of work. But that is fairly common to any number of deceased rock stars.

What is uncommon is that Bowie used what he had learned along his personal journey to help others in his sphere of influence to get clean, mentoring them and helping them get through to the other side, too. Iggy Pop, for one, attributes his continued presence on this earthly plane directly to Bowie. And he’s not alone.

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails (NiN) speaks eloquently in the Rolling Stone tribute issue about his own struggle with drugs and says that without the support and belief in him which Bowie showed, he would not be here today. While touring together, Reznor recalls that despite being at the height of their career as NiN, he was at his personal lowest point. He also recalls something Bowie said to him, quietly and without reproach, during this time. “You know, there is a better way here, and it doesn’t have to end in despair or in death, in the bottom.”

Bowie was at that time clean, happily married, and enjoying life to the full as a father and husband, with a future and a family he could now embrace in peace. Having been that Low (sorry, couldn’t resist) himself, Bowie knew exactly how hard it could be to get clean. With simple grace and without judgement or lecture, he was for Reznor and many others simply an example of what life could offer when you walked away from drugs forever. Reznor focussed on that, and he did indeed come out the other side, with a little help from his friend.

Let’s let Reznor say it his way. This is a quote direct from the Rolling Stone article: “A few years later, Bowie came through L.A. I’d been sober for a fair amount of time. I wanted to thank him in the way that he helped me. And I reluctantly went backstage, feeling weird and ashamed, like, “Hey, I’m the guy that puked on the rug.” And again, I was met with warmth, and grace, and love. And I started to say, “Hey listen, I’ve been clean for …” I don’t even think I finished the sentence; I got a big hug. And he said, “I knew. I knew you’d do that. I knew you’d come out of that.” I have goosebumps right now just thinking about it. It was another very important moment in my life.

The power of faith in people, and belief in their own inner strength, cannot be underestimated. For those people that can no longer believe in themselves, the faith of others is often the only light they can see in their personal darkness. Be the light.


Blackstar

Today, the world is a darker place.

Today, the light which was David Robert Jones, AKA David Bowie, was forever extinguished. At the age of 69 he succumbed to an 18 month battle against cancer, and as his star finally went out, the night has turned black.

I am still processing this. Bowie has been my hero for forty years. I was psyched to buy the new album, Blackstar, which was released on his birthday just 48 hours ago. And then he died. And I, along with the rest of the world, got the real meaning  behind this album.

It was his epitaph. He is the Blackstar. Knowing for 18 months that he was dying, he went into the studio to record this parting gift, and say farewell. On his terms, right to the end. Good on ya.

The entire album has only one voice: His. I would not be surprised to discover that he also played all the instruments. This was his final work, his Magnum Opus. Back to relying on only himself to come up with the goods, it is almost as though he went back to that bedroom this all started in, in Brixton, London, recording the Space Oddity demo. This music shows how far he came, yet returns to his roots at the same time. And of course, he nailed it, yet again.

I like to think that he knew his final journey was one he had to take alone, and he built that into the album. You can hear it in the voice as well as in the heartbreaking lyrics. No other voices. He planned, prepared and executed this project,  knowing he had months left to live. It was his ‘Going out in style’ project, and one of his best works, the music really is fantastic. An amazing showman right to the end. Can you imagine the strength of character that must take? Respect.

I watched the video for the title track with new eyes. Here’s my take.

Bowie’s career took flight in 1969 with Space Oddity, and Major Tom was catapulted into existence. Ashes to Ashes came much later, and showed the ch-ch-changes Major Tom (and Mr. Bowie) had gone through along the way.

The Blackstar video neatly bookends the career and completes the journey of Major Tom as we see the skeletal astronaut lying dead on a barren planet under a black star. Major Tom found his final resting place, on the other side of the event horizon.  He is taken to the ‘Villa of Amen’ (House of God, of course) where a solitary candle burns to mark the passing of this great being, with the diamond encrusted skull and eyes. His journey complete, he can be at rest. The celebrants dance as they mourn. As will we. Not a smile to be seen.

Bowie wears buttons on his eyes during the video. Placing buttons or pennies on the eyes of the dead is an ancient practice.

The middle eight? Soul searing. It’s as if he rolled back the Bowie voice to the 70’s. Simple, melodic, haunting. And it made me cry.

He knew he was dying. And yet he passes the torch to whoever fate and the whims of the music industry will make into the next star.

Something happened on the day he died
Spirit rose a metre and stepped aside
Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried

(I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar)

The song and video both trail into a discordant instrumental mix which seems at first unnecessary, almost filler, until it dawns on you… we are hearing  this amazing man’s failing heartbeat, and we are there as he takes his last breath. If you have ever sat by a deathbed, you will know what I mean, And you will hear it in this song. It slides into. Silence. And you will sit there waiting for one more breath that you know deep inside will never come. Just another minute, please…

David is famously quoted as saying “I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.” Wherever you are now, David, it won’t be boring. For you. For us? This world is a darker place.

Man, I’m going to miss you.

The Man, the myth, the legend.

Merry Christmas – The Making Of

Nikki and I created a personal Christmas card to send to friends and family which generated a lot of interest and questions along the lines of “How did you do that?!” Here’s the answer: Magic.

No? OK. Spoilsport. A classic Photoshop technique, then. Here’s how it works.

First, the practicalities. Set up your camera on a tripod so that the field of view covers everything you eventually want to include. A little forethought goes a long way, here. Visualizing the end result saves time and lets you plan all the shots you will need, and where things need to be. A tripod or some stable platform is vital. The camera must not move in between shots, and you will need one shot for every time you want to appear in the final image. That’s the trick. Multiple photos of the same room. Only the people move.

For this image, I wanted it to look as though the homeowners had been disturbed, and came downstairs to find a party in full swing. My variation of “The Night Before Christmas”, where in this case, nothing was moving, not even a mouse…except for the party in the living room. That’s why we have the bathrobes on. I framed the composition so that it included the door frame (so we could be seen peeking around it) and the dining room (so we could be seen at the table).

Then, it was time to play dress up. We changed several times in between shots and had a lot of fun improvising around the plan – Nikki came up with the hip flask (empty, by the way!) and I came up with the unconscious revelers on the floor. She even got in the Maple Leafs. Regrettably they were not sponsoring us.

For best results, full manual mode works best, and is in fact almost essential if you want to avoid a lot of post processing adjustments. Focus the camera on the main point of interest (here, that’s the tree) and set your aperture to at least f11 or higher to make sure the depth of field is sufficient to encompass the whole room. You don’t want out of focus people, do you? A couple of test shots will help you bracket the correct exposure to set ISO and shutter speed. Manual mode means the camera will not change setting between shots, so they will all be exposed the same way.  Once focused, make sure you turn off autofocus, which would otherwise make each shot different. It is meant to look like a single image and nothing kills that magic quicker than multiple focal points.

Some cameras have remotes, which let you trigger the shot from across the room. Others have 10 second timers. Whatever works for your setup, enjoy the fun and take as many shots as you need, at leisure. There is no time limit or rush, since the camera settings are locked. The only consideration would be if you did this during the day with sunlight coming through the windows. The sun moves faster than you think and the lighting coming through windows moves with it. That can make it difficult to match things up in Photoshop later, so I would recommend an evening shoot after sunset – no moving shadows, consistent lighting. A simple tip, but it may save you a lot of hair pulling and gnashing of teeth.

I think we took around a dozen images. The ones you don’t use, just discard. It’s all part of the fun. Once you have all your images, it’s time to take them into Photoshop.

Open each image as a separate layer. If your tripod was steady, and your manual exposure was set correctly and autofocus was turned off, each image should be almost the same. The camera never moved, nor did the room, and the lighting was unchanged. Just the people moved. So the actual room is the same in every shot.

Choose the focal image of the bunch and move it to the bottom of the layer stack. I used the shot of Nikki and I in front of the tree, standing up. Turn off all but this bottom layer. It is your base image. Then turn on the first layer above it. This will hide your base image, so ALT-click the Mask icon to give this upper layer a ‘hide all’ mask. This should hide the topmost layer and show the bottom layer again. Then take a brush, and paint with white on the black mask of the upper layer. Paint where the people in that image are seen and they should magically appear as you paint.

Go through each successive layer in the same way and your room will soon be filled with party goers. Job done!

The tricky part is the part which really sells the image:. The part where you seem to be standing in front of or behind yourself. That takes some finessing. Zoom in close on each mask and work slowly. It may help to temporarily reduce the opacity of the layer you are working on so you can see the layer beneath.  Feather your brush – real life photos do not have sharp edges. It’s a fact.

As you can see from the card above, with a little effort you can produce a great effect which is more time consuming than difficult.

For us, including taking the photos, changing clothes, taking them into Photoshop and doing the manipulations needed, the whole thing took around two hours. Granted, after working with Photoshop for so long, it’s second nature to me. I work fast, I had all the shots in my head before I ever set up the tripod, and that made it much easier. Nikki, by the way, is a fantastic model to work with.

With some forward planning an image like this should not take a long time at all to create and… so what if it did? This is a labour of love. And of course this same technique can be used in many other ways. Play volleyball on the beach with yourself. Give yourself a jumping high-five. As I type, I’m thinking it would be fun to punch myself in the face. Not literally, but wouldn’t that be a great image?

We found this a fun way to spend part of an afternoon, and by wasting two lazy hours on a Sunday afternoon we now have a memorable Christmas card, and a lasting image that will always be uniquely ours. You can’t buy that off the shelf.

Merry Christmas, one and all. From the Greens. All of us. 🙂

Merry Christmas from the Greens
Welcome to the party

Merry Christmas!

As regular readers will know, the edible Nikki and I recently purchased a house, and we moved in in August. This will be our first Christmas in the new domicile, and to mark it Nikki purchased a live tree (a first for both of us), some decorations, and every available string of festive lights in a 25 mile radius. She festooned the house with them. We now have lights on the tree, shining snowmen in the windows, and battery driven candles on the tables.

Outside on the porch we have lights enough to land a plane by. Thanks to David for that. While I’m messing around with a ladder, he’s just reaching up and clipping them to the porch. I just let him get on with it, he was going much faster than I was with that ladder! Oh, the perks of being that young. And freakishly tall.

We even have a spinning mechanical Santa that runs around the hardwood floors singing and scaring the cats. And that’s fine.

As this is a year of firsts, we also thought it a great time to reboot our annual Christmas Card! This tradition will carry on from this point until I eventually croak, hopefully sometime around the next millennium. This year, the theme is simply us having fun in the new house. With my own special twist, of course.

I posted it on Facebook first, and it was the single most liked photo of the year. I’ve had several people ask me how this card was done. I’m going to post a separate blog about that, since it was fun to do and not at all difficult once you know how. As with most things creative, a little imagination is all that is required. Of course, it helps to be immensely skilled and available for hire please call now for details…

Sorry. Back to the point: Merry Christmas, from the Greens!

Fun with Photoshop

While developing some new creative techniques in Photoshop I was throwing pixels around to see if I could achieve the effect I wanted. I could. Yay. And as I worked those pixels, for some reason an overheard phrase kept floating into my mind. “We designed it to be so simple a child could use it.”

So I grabbed my pen and started to work anew. I found myself coming up with this concept, which I am now developing for one of the companies in our medical division. It depicts the ease of use of our SaaS and cloud services, avoiding all the usual tech heavy text and sales patter commonly found in such adverts.

This concept is not about bandwidth, capacity, security or features. It’s about how it feels to use the software.

It feels like being a kid again: Like stepping right out of the phone and away from technology: Like working from the beach: Like being a kid running through a field of grass, stress free.

This captures sunshine and freedom and a whole new way of working. Follow our bouncing ball, Pied Piper style, to new horizons and new adventures only made possible by this brave new world. Sorry, went into marketing mode for a minute. In a nutshell, it’s so simple a child could use it. I think I hit my target.

The question is: Does it work? Discuss.

Click to view at a larger size. Feel free to leave comments. Thanks!

Balloon EHR
Click the image to view at larger size!

Windows 10 New Default Settings May Open Back Doors. Or not.

Like 67 million others in the first week of release, I have upgraded to Windows 10. It was a painless transition which held no real drama – it just worked. I was, however, interested to discover the defaults that the new Microsoft operating system ships with.

The new Microsoft defaults could potentially compromise the security and stability of medical practices and facilities, or indeed of any organization that uses computers.

As many of you know, I author technical blogs for several multinational companies, one of which is the VSS Medical Group, a group of companies specializing in medical software. So what? Well, the product range includes hospital and practice management systems called EHR’s that hold vast amounts of patient health and treatment data, along with associated personal health information (PHI). That prompted me to write this piece, which has already gone out across North America and Canada to all our subscribers.

In a nutshell, then, this is what you need to know.

Windows-10Windows 10 introduces automatic updating by default. Updates will occur when Microsoft says they will. This is good, in that any zero day patches for serious issues will be rolled out automatically, protecting the entire Windows using population even while they sleep. That is pretty amazing. It could be problematic, however, if Microsoft decides to reboot all your office computers during the working day. Imagine a power outage. Same result. In a hospital, that could even be fatal.

You can override this new default and set your own schedule, and I will show you how to do this further on.

This version of Windows also introduces peer-to-peer updates. Yes, just like BitTorrent. Up until now all updates have come from the dedicated servers at Microsoft. This new default really changes this playing field. Here’s how it works now.

Rather than all updates downloading from Microsoft, they are now by default pulled from and shared with the strongest connection offering the fastest available download source. That source could be your other PC’s, or a computer down the block. Conversely, others can get their updates from your PC. Note that.

This is fantastic news if, as in our home here at Gyst Towers, there are a half dozen computers scattered around. Rather than each computer having to download massive individual updates, any update is only downloaded once, to the first PC. The rest of the computers on the networks then share that update among themselves, saving huge amounts of extra download time and bandwidth. Pretty neat.

This will be advantageous in a medical practice (or any organization) with multiple computers on their own internal network. However, it is in principal no different than having a virus: A software patch that spreads automatically across your network and updates all your computers without your knowledge. You may find this to be of concern. I do. And I know many IT administrators that are already losing sleep over this. Because bad guys are good at finding holes.

The update system has been extensively tested by Microsoft and is undoubtedly robust and secure. But. Bad guys find new ways into secured computer systems every day. From that, it is not a huge leap to foresee a malicious update finding its way into computers through this new update system. If such a thing happens the results could, no, would be catastrophic. Review the data breach headlines for 2015. Of course, it may never happen. But…it could.

Fortunately, this default too can be changed. Here’s how.

Click your snazzy new Start Button (hooray!) and then Settings. Click ‘Update & security’. If not selected, click the Windows Update tab over on the left. Then back in the centre choose Advanced options. This is where you set how your updates are installed.

I suggest setting this to ‘Notify to schedule restart’. This will notify you when an update is available and let you avoid those automatic midday restarts mentioned earlier. You can schedule a more convenient time, say during the evening when the office is closed. Note well, you are now responsible for your own updates. Keep an eye out for notifications or you could miss an important one.

Next, look a little further down the same screen to find ‘Choose how updates are delivered’. Click that to turn on or off ‘Updates from more than one place’. After reading the provided explanation of the benefits of this new system, you will want to turn this OFF if you are paranoid. Frankly, you should be if you are handling medical data and PHI. HIPAA will be proud of you. Even if you are not, you may want to close this potential loophole. Doing this will ensure all your updates come from Microsoft and only from Microsoft. If you have a network of computers, you can instead leave this set to ON, and click the radio button which says ‘PC’s on my local network’. That offers the best of both worlds: You only download from Microsoft, but your computers will share each update between themselves.

The new defaults are now modified and you can go about your day.

Windows-10I have found Windows 10 to be solid, extremely fast, reliable and a pleasure to use. The upgrade was amazingly smooth and went without a hitch. This was an absolutely phenomenal achievement for any company. Microsoft effectively upgraded the whole world overnight, and did it with nary a noticeable hitch. Kudos to them. With the small exception of these new default settings and the concerns they raise, I can whole-heartedly say the experience has, for me, been exceptional. I am enjoying the new features immensely.

P.S. – I have spoken with some people that have expressed concern that the Windows 10 upgrade would affect some of their web or cloud-based services. Be reassured. The upgrade only affects your own computer(s). Cloud solution are unaffected, as your provider is the one hosting the service and all your data. You simply log in via your web interface as before: No change to any files or way of working. Business as usual. Nice.

 

Sig Cube on Metal Plate

Another experiment in 3D rendering, this cube takes my existing Cube concept to a whole new level. A different direction, a new look. I like it. I like it a lot.

The flexibility offered by adding dedicated 3D software into my repertoire is amazing. Not so much for photo realistic renders, I’m not interested in that. For design. I can use the techniques I am developing here for a huge range of possibilities.

For example, I discovered that this Cube looks just as amazing from the inside. Standing on one of the letters and looking up, it looks like a cityscape scene right out of a Lego movie. Just add characters. Or, the view from inside a toy box. Add a youngster raising the lid and staring down in wonderment. It’s just a matter of scale.

Using 3D software I can take this cube and render it anywhere, at any size, under any lighting conditions. I can break it apart, hide faces, view it from any angle, any distance. And I can do this for any cube, not just this one. Different words. Different worlds.

I used Illustrator, Blender 3D, and Photoshop to create this. Finding the best workflow to use these together was a learning curve of design decisions. Now I have that workflow down, I can recreate this or anything like it at will. That could prove very useful. It’s a valuable skill set that I’m glad I spend time developing.

Suddenly it seems there are no limits to what I can achieve.

None.

How cool is that?

(Click this photo for the even bigger picture. You’ll be glad you did.)

Click for larger image. Really, please, click it!
Click for larger image. Really, please, click it!