wow... o.O

I'll say, this is strikingly beautiful.

I just went in to look at this Steve and you've transcended... when did that happen? You went from creating beautiful images from within your comfort zone to creating magnificently thought out multiple techniqued (I'm sorry I know it drives you crazy when I make up words) masterpieces. It's like you have mentored yourself hahahahaha I am so very impressed and proud of you, you are one of the most talented artists I know. I show my friends your work all the time, I am so happy to see you rising up and claiming this wonderful medium as your own. Yay you!

very deep and striking...
and great technique ....I learn from almost everything you do :)

Thanks, guys but .... um.... er.... I didn't do anything here that I don't do all the time. Same bunch of hubs and pretty much in the same order. Actually, when I was making it I kept trying to figure out how to expand my repertoire of hubs and techniques. I couldn't figure out a way. I think I'm more or less wedded to the same bunch of five or six hubs for everything. I can't seem to get my head around most of the others. That's why I study your and other creations. But thanks all the same for the kind words.

<3! Very nice, but the funniest thing about this place is, I don't know how to work any of the tools! You mastered it!

ElectricxDaisy said: <3! Very nice, but the funniest thing about this place is, I don't know how to work any of the tools! You mastered it!

Thanks ElectricxDaisy. When I got here a couple of years ago I had hardly ever done art before and I had no sense of what these tools were all about. But I found an incredibly helpful and friendly community of people here who were eager to help me learn. That's the amazing thing about this place. People are always helpful and friendly.

With the new Mentoring program it's even better. Pick an application that you want to learn, play with it a bit so that you'll know what kinds of questions to ask, and then ask for a mentor. Most important, just play and have fun.

Oh, you say I've "mastered it." Nobody here has mastered these tools, especially not Peacock. Even the guys who write the code have been surprised at new possibilities people discover in it.

Welcome to the friendliest site I've ever seen and to a community of talented, kind, and helpful people. Have fun.

Yeats? Certainly this needs a poem. Wonderfully evocative -- ominous and compelling. Or maybe not ominous, maybe a night on the moors with no hounds. It seems closer to a real scene than you often go. Wonderful moon, vegetation, milky aura. Wonderful impendingness.

Madeup words count if you can feel what they mean!

Well, if it's as ominous as all that it may be touched by Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, one of the creepiest things I know. I actually read it again just a few months ago and it creeped me out as much as it always has. Fortunately that's the only thing it does for me ... creep me out. It's not one of those that I revisit for pleasure or try to learn.

I have been brooding (as it were) a lot on Yeats' sonnet _Leda and the Swan_. Obsessing about it really. This may have something to do with the very dark tone of this image. The issue is Yeats' ability to take something horrible and violent and make a thing of beauty from it. But that's another story.

On the other hand, it could just be the opening of Snoopy's (and Bulwer-Lytton's) novel ... "It was a dark and stormy night"