This is the first brand new piece done post-joining FA. It started with a vague idea, developed into researching effects in GIMP, and morphed into what it is today.

I wanted to do a piece that in some way reflected the idea of a pool of energy with the potential to become many things, a sort of essence of both the possibility and the lack of certainty involved when you shift around so much inside like I do. My original idea, actually, was to have animal shapes coming out of flames, but in trying to figure out how to render the flames, I happened upon a tutorial about the Render>Nature>Flames filter in GIMP. (I use 2.8 with the paint studio 2 series install, incidentally.) The effect the person was getting didn't look like fire to me at all, but it was interesting. I started to think about other kinds of energy instead of flames, and I started playing around with the tools at my disposal. I was able to render the basic "splatter" there, using the flame render and a LOT of messing around with it, but the project didn't really gel until I discovered another flame-related tutorial. It used a GIMP plugin called G'MIC to create luminous lines on a black background out of a photo. Now I had something to work with.

I'm sure that at least half of the people on this site could render this thing in about three minutes flat. It took me a week of laboring over it a couple hours a day, but then, I'm fairly rusty with digital stuff in general and pretty new to GIMP.

ALMOST all of the images in the final picture are from photos I took. I have a huge stockpile of photos I've taken at zoos to work with, that I always THINK I'll do something with but never really have, till now. (The only other thing I've done with them really is sketch the otter sketch from one!) I was a little limited in that I wanted to only use things that I have a personal affinity for, since I was trying to make up something of a landscape of my shifting life. You'll see they're not all cats, although cats figure heavily. The mountain lion, bobcat, tiger, tiger paw, otter and wolf (which is a mexican wolf standing in for a grey wolf, since I had no grey wolf photos) are all photos I took at the zoo. (Three zoos over two states.) The two wings are from toys that we have in the house, because I didn't have anything that looked 'dragony' from a zoo (obviously) and my bird photos weren't cooperating (if the background is too 'busy' - like aviary leaves - it makes it hard to render the lines with G'MIC). The cat and the lion are courtesy of photos from freedigitalphotos.net. I do have photos of both lions and cats. However, they weren't working for this project. The lion photos are all either through glass (light streaks and enough blurring to throw off the filter) or through wire bars (which show up like neon signs with the filter). My cat photos are of my cat, who is a shorthaired tabby, and while I do have enough photos of him to theoretically work from, the patterning, body type and coat type were not working for me, so I had to go find a solid colored, fluffy cat.

If it were entirely true to me, there would be more house cats, and the tiger would figure a bit more heavily than the lion. But there came a point where visual aesthetics were more important than a truly accurate mix.

It was an interesting experiment, and although I'm sure it's quite banal to people who've been doing digital work for a while, I'm actually quite happy with it.