Playing around with a little trompe l'oeil.

Steve Klebs
www.cloudinthesky.com

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Download 'fly on shadow.png' (166 KB)

Preview of image 'fly on shadow.png'

... and the big magician died. And with the time, long after his flesh had 
vanished, his skull started to shrink down in size, and to get a somehow 
crystal structure. And three milleniums after his dead, his skull was now 
pure smaragd, and there was a magic light living within the solid boundaries 
of the vanished magician's shrunken skull.

It was a dark day in autumn, when Dantan went into the old forest. One of 
these days, where humid was in the air, and the light rare. Dantan was 
actually afraid to go deep into the old forest, but this very day he was 
just not recognizing how deep he went into, his mind was somewhere else. And 
so he passed tree by tree, and his feet left the pathways the druids created 
since the begin of all times, walking now on green mosses.

Too late he recognized that he had lost his way and any feeling for the 
right direction. And worser, the darkness started already to come out 
between the old, mighty stems, so much earlier than expected.

--- to be continued by everyone ---

Sven

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A fly buzzed past Dantan's head. He waved it away, distracted.

Then he heard a strange sound. A sound of movement. Not exactly a rustling,
but something that could not actually be named. He turned in its direction,
peering into the shadows away from the setting sun. There was a faint
glimmer of light.

At first he thought it was something reflecting the sunset, but the color
was wrong. More green, with a hint of yellow, not the deep red of the sun.

--- Not great, but nobody else was volunteering to continue. :-) ---

BTW, the image is great. Was the fly pasted in from a seperate rendering, or
did you do that all in one shot?

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It was layered from 3 separate renders:
    (1) the refractive skull as background
    (2) the semi-transparent shadow of the fly (masked and feathered in 
Photoshop)
    (3) the fly itself with a +UA background
They were composited as PNG image maps in POV, which proves a very versatile 
paint program at times.

Steve Klebs
www.cloudinthesky.com

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What was that green light? What caused it? Dantan became curious and decided 
to walk towards that occasional greenish reflection. But, what the heck..? 
The closer he came, the more he felt a kind of vibration! Just a glimpse of 
a vibration. And was it just in his head, was it in his soul? Was it the 
entire ground? Dantan couldn't say.

He stepped forward. One step. Another step. And a step more. The underground 
cracked suddenly. Dantan looked down. Just a small branch of a tree, there 
were many branches on the ground.

He reached the place where he had seen the green reflections before. But 
what was here? What caused that reflection? Dantan looked around, but he saw 
nothing. Not yet. He was in the middle of a small place. No trees here, just 
around. And around that little open place was a number of stones, different 
in size. Sometimes, the nature seemed to be able for the most unnatural 
looking formations of stones, Dantan thought, and walked towards one of 
these stones.

Was it a border stone? And what were these ... things ... on the stone's 
surface? Carvings? Could it be...? Once, when he still was a very young boy, 
Dantan heard these stories the oldest of his village used to tell small 
children. When he grew older, he believed that these stories were just 
nothing else than stories to excite and entertain young children. But these 
stories were full of mysts and ancient glory. And many times, they contained 
the name of an ancient wizard. One of the greatest wizards, and also one of 
the last great heroes in the eternal fight against some elementar earth 
powers. What was again the name of that wizard? Dantan closed his eyes and 
tried to remember. He couldn't.

Not even important at all, he thought. He continued to look to these 
carvings and tried to figure out if they were man-made or just a result of 
rain, wind and other elemental powers he was not aware of. And then he saw 
it! Again, a reflection! He turned his head and...


--- to be continued by everyone ---

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