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This would be me AND my cousin, fooling around with Photoshop.
Photoshop 3.0, Kai's Power Tools 2, a stock image of pebbles.
This is the pebbles. Really. You can't see any actual pebbles because they've been Difference Cloud-ed beyond recognition, but they're there. Trust me. This "Wild Abstract Background" technique simply involves picking two bright colours, and applying difference clouds to your image (you can use any image, or start with regular clouds). Then flip the colours, change colours, etc, Difference Clouding umpteen times. Use CTRL-F a lot. ('Shop 3's Command Palette is useful, too. Assign any filters to F-keys for real shortcuts!) The image was also copied and flipped and multiplied, twice (once on each axis). This creates a 4-way symmetry, which is good for quick & dirty seamless tile creation.
4-way symmetry is kinda boring, even if it is psychadelic
blobs of colour. So, to show off some of 'Shop's other new toys, I
said, "How about some text?" My cousin, an NIN fanatic, naturally suggests
"NIN" as default text for any experiment.
I created a new layer for the text, and put in a big Square
font NI. Then I copied, pasted and flipped that for the mirror image
"N". The "I" didn't turn out quite right, so I deleted it and just
drew a rectangle. Sometimes the simple stuff works faster and better.
A drop shadow is always a must, so I copied the text (at this
point, just plain black) to another layer and made it semi-transparent. To
be different, we offset the shadow to the upper left.
BJ wanted a metallic look for the text, so we browsed through
the KPT metallic textures. None were good enough. After an hour
or so of screwing around with the KPT textures, we came up with a black and
white one that fit the bill. A little diagonal motion-blurring didn't
hurt.
Now that this was shaping up to be something really cool
we could save, I naturally wanted on of my favorite touches: a Lens Flare.
This was a huge pain! Because the rest of the image was already
seamless, I had to put the flare on its own layer so I could offset it without
affecting the rest of the image. Ever try to put a lens flare on an
empty layer? Well, don't, it doesn't work. I figured I'd fill
the layer with black, then I could use the layer options to make the black
invisible. That, and some extra transparency, and some lighten or hard/soft
light blending, and a lot of trial and error, and voila! Looks simple,
don't it? Remember, kids, it's easier to do stuff when you plan everything
out.
Later, I added the copyright text (yes, it's there, you have
to look harder). It's the Square font, in white, on it's own layer.
I dropped the opacity to 44% and used a lightening mode. It looked
to boring and straight along the side of the N like that, so I used the Shear
filter to put a little wave on it.
To make this into wallpaper of your very own: click on the image above to get the JPG file into your browser. You should be able to save it from there. Change it to a 256-colour BMP file. You might also want to shrink it down some. Set it as your wallpaper file. Remember to turn the tiling option on. Now you can be as cool as me and my cousin! (Or, if you have Weenies 95, you can use the JPG file as wallpaper. Okay, Bill Gates had ONE good thing about stupid Weenies 95.)
Now I was nice and made the copyright stuff very unnoticable, so all you NIN maniacs could enjoy the design in peace. Yes, you can use it on your computer, and even pass it around to all your NIN-obsessed buddies. But you can't sell it, or put it into any type of software package to distribute. On the other hand, you could Email me and ask to have permission to do that sort of thing. (See my Resumé for Email contacts.)
copyright: ©1995 All rights reserved. You may download this image for viewing on your computer. You may NOT print it, upload it anywhere, use it for a commercial or non-commercial illustration or companion piece, place it (or a link to it) on your web page, without requesting and obtaining PRIOR permission from the artist. For contact details, click here.
price list: This image is not currently available as a print. However, if you wish to obtain a print, pelase let me know. The print size is approximately 1.5" x 4", but it can be tiled, of course. For contact details, click here.