Instructions for Viewing: These pictures look best on a computer screen. (The color is like stained-glass and 72dpi isso low bandwidth.) However, you are welcome to download and print them out.* 
On a PC, the Preview will look best. If you have a Macintosh, the Preview will appear a little light, but the Highlighted Text version will be perfect. This only applies to monitors; printing will be the same on either.
The Preview Icon will take you quickly to a small image for consideration. The Highlighted Text will give you detailed viewing in a larger version suitable for printing. The large versions also are made to load with only a short wait. Fun Fact: The usual time it takes for you to load and look at one of the big pictures, multiplied by 2500, is the average time it takes to create one.
The Hall of the Magic Wings
All of this work was created without post-production editing. The tiny lights and fog were rendered by being placed on a transparent sheet in front of the virtual camera.
Burlap
Sometimes you dream a picture that needs making. When it's finished, the sense that you've already made the picture some forgotten time before is very strong.
Hand to Hand
The computer provides new hands for the artist in 3D. (The old ones lie idle, tools for the devil.) Here's a portrait tour de force with 5 versions of me [okay, it's really a self-portrait forced tour; can you find them all?]. This work is complete even to a room built around the table creating the reflections. As a result, the room can be rendered as a panorama looking out from the table.
Morning Birds
Painted in Photoshop, this is not a 3D rendering but is included as an introduction to the next picture.
The Blue Hour
Most 3D work seems to exist solely for hard glossy objects. This one shows instead the softness of cloth and dusk.
Hard Glossy Objects Redux
Ever looked in one mirror with another behind you? You seem to go on forever. So do these HGOs.
Urbantine
Did you ever notice how the tail lights of cars zooming at night can look like snakes? The guy watching this scene from his window has. This one also renders as a good panorama.
Jour
et Nuit
The colors of day make this castle seem much different than in night's spectrum. This picture was an attempt at simplifying detail. Most of my stuff has intricacies too fine to be rendered at a size suitable for the web, like
the Princess
on the balcony. From scratch completion took only 18 hours, which is really fast for me.
Italian Garden
This is a good example of creating depth with bump maps. The image is lower where there are shadows and higher where it is light. It also makes a good desktop background.
A Picture To Go with the Couch
Have you ever seen those ads for art by the foot on late night TV? You can almost hear the squeals of delight at discovering "the perfect picture to go over the couch." Let's face it, to ensure a match to die for requires a painting of the couch to hang over the couch. Here the ultimate fulfillment incorporates a charming pattern derived from an antique rice bowl.
Study of a Study
Another late night idea and another interesting pattern. The idea was a new way to quickly design an ornate building. The pattern is from the window of Vincent Price's airship in the old movie "Master of the World." I tried to fake the books with a drawing but ended up having to put them in one by one. The paper on the table begins the lines from Coleridge, "In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn/A stately pleasure dome decree." Legend has it that a visitor interrupted his enhanced poetry session, and when the poet returned he had lost his train of thought, never to regain it. Here you can see what his study might have looked like to him in his enhanced state of mind.
Read Letter
Sometimes the photographer in me wants to translate a 3D image onto a flat plane. The result is more like simple graphic design, but I think the method lends itself well to subtle drama. [Another example of this flat approach is Maiden USA , which you can see by accessing the multimedia story link at the bottom of this page.]
Outer Order
And sometimes the 3D artist in me wants to translate flat stuff into 3D. This was made long ago with a very old version of Freehand; it made an excellent start-up screen for my little old computer.
College Collage
You can tell this is a commercial piece because the models are less complex and rely on many computerized surfaces and fewer custom-made textures. It was made for a college directory put out by the Metro system in Washington, DC. But focus groups preferred a photograph of the Capitol, so back to the drawing board.
Rose's Knot Here
This was made with a fun little shareware program called Knot. Its only purpose is to make elaborate and strange beauty by generating 3D models of interlooped pipeline extrusions. Just wait until we can render those multiple dimensions proposed by string theory.
Ikaros
Although this is made entirely by rendering 3D images, I diffused it in Photoshop because, in the beginning, I thought that 3D images somehow weren't valid unless they looked like scans of traditional art. (On the other hand, this old-fashioned image was rejected by AOL during the first wave of Internet censorship controversy. Oh, the scandal! Who can notice art without it.) Questions & Comments are most welcome and helpful. Letters from you have inspired these pages and most of what's on them. Would you like to look at how the images are made?
Or immerse yourself in these collected deep thoughts on art?
How about a visit to the art in 3D-rendered Old Town?
Want to interact with a multimedia story about art and artists?
