Never before seen art

These are either works I never got around to posting, felt unfinished or simply not good enough to match the rest of my gallery.
These will probably remain in my scrapped pieces folder indefinitely, but I am open to suggestions on improving any of them that you think show potential.

1. Life in Bloom



This was done, I believe, 2 years ago. Partly inspired by my old A rose in the wind and partly by a digital painting I'd found on deviantart at the time, which I am sorry, but was unable to locate. It was similar in concept, there was a man linked to tree roots underground, but from what I gathered that was more of a portrayal of going back to the roots.
Model is the ever-lovely Almudena-Stock

2. Galactica



This is probably the oldest of the batch that is to be posted here, it dates like 3 years back, when I was a hardcore Battlestar Galactica fan. It's actually very much unrelated to the show, but it's sci-fi, has a galaxy background and was supposed to portray like a ruler of the universe.
Stock provided by the amazing Marcus J. Ranum

3. Untitled landscape



This was done some time last spring, merely as matte painting practice, at the suggestion of Eduardo Agostini.
Matte paintings are fun to make but a real pain considering the amount of photos required for one. And this one was merely like 8 photos in all. The pros use dozens so hats off to them.

4. Oriental Princess



This was done in late spring last year. It came shortly before the one Oriental Princess I had eventually posted on DeviantArt. I didn't exactly want a series, so I picked the one I considered the better of the two.

5. Hot Mess



Just a fun piece. I loved the original image and her hair seemed like it could look good in fire. Which it does. The rest of it, not so much. Guitar looks good too, but I feel I messed up pretty bad with the hands.

6. Bloody Mary



This was made last year around Halloween for Renderosity's "Urban Legends" Competition.
I went with a very obvious choice, since I'm not actually familiar with many of these urban legends anyways, so I picked Bloody Mary. Portrayed in a typical silent but deadly way.
I do love how the rose vines climb up the frame. May use the background and frame for something slightly different, because that part I like a lot.

7. Disturbia



If you hadn't guessed by now, it's inspired by Ana Fagarazzi and Natalia Suellen and of course Rihanna - Disturbia
I love the way they can create atmosphere using lights and while I think I got some of them right, I'm not entirely happy with this piece. Which is why it's here.

8. Succubus



This was started about 2 months ago. Inspired by a friend's life experience with a cruel and shallow woman. Was left unfinished until recently, when I felt my heart ripped out of my body. Finishing it was more terapeutic than anything. This is not my type of art, I tend to go for what looks pretty, but it was a really good way to let go of some negative feelings.

That's about it. I have 3 more saved here, but I feel they have true potential to shine so I'm going to fix them up a bit and ultimately post them on my website and deviantart. So stay tuned :)

A Few Retouches

I'm fairly new to retouching. Yeah, that sounds pretty crazy right? Considering I've been working with Photoshop for over 5 years now and I was doing touch-ups to the models in my manips for just about as long.
Well, see, professional retouching is serious business. You can't exactly smudge skin, because you're expected to preserve the texture, especially since it's supposed to look like a real photograph and not something that was clearly run through Photoshop.
Here's what I consider to be my best so far. Please note I've only started retouching 4 months ago. Still finding a tough time cleaning rebel strands of hair :(

All images work as roll-overs, so move your cursor over each for the "before". May take a while to load so for that I apologize.

Glitter Styles

I'll be revamping this profile tomorrow, the design feels so... last year, so I'll focus on that before I post anything new.
But until then, you can snatch these Glitter Photoshop Styles. I made them in CS3, but they should be compatible with all versions. Worth a try at least.

DOWNLOAD

Has it really been that long?

Since my last blog update.
Guess so.
Last one is dated to March 2010. Close to a year.
Anyways. I'm back.
Not sure how often I will be updating, but I can promise I won't let another year pass until I update next.
That's all for this post. Keeping it short for now. (It's late.)

Art shows, Contests and Scam Artists

I know it's been a million and one years ago since I last updated here. Mostly because I didn't have anything good to say and because I thought I'd let this page die if I didn't update it.
This was gonna show up instead on my Deviantart journal instead, but I figured it wouldn't be the best place to debate this.
I'm curious if anyone has fallen victim to any of these art scam artists. If you don't know what an art scam artist is, just google the definition of a scam artist and consider his field of expertise to be art.
This was brought up from a recent constant flood of e-mails asking me to sign-up to various art shows and contests that require a tax of at least 50$ as entry fee. Can you smell the rat? Cause I sure can if it stinks like hell.
If you can't, I'll make this more obvious.
Contests never require entry fees. Would you pay to enter a competition you may very well not win? Plus, upon a closer examination of the whole document written in font size 0.1, you're actually expected to sign off your rights to your entry.
Art shows. Never had one, but if you get contacted for it, they will not call it "entry fee per image displayed", they will tell you the space has to be rented and you have to pay for it, for a number of days. They will not ask you to upload your high-res file on a FTP server for them to print it for the art show, they will request that you personally deliver your art on canvas for them to display. If you were contacted for any of these marked with the negation in front, mark the address as spam and delete the e-mail.
Art Dealers. These are people who claim to have connections with art collectors and galleries all over the world. They will ask you to pay them in order for them to use said connections to get your art seen. Optionally they will ask for large art files so they can "showcase the artistry in detail".
Other ways of detecting scams.
- Since on a general base most of these people probably didn't get to finish high-school, you should be aware of any misspelled words and any grammar errors.
- They claim they found out about you from people you've never met or communities you've never joined.
There's probably more to add to this, but it's late and I'm tired.
You can draw your own conclusions from here.

Why warranties are no good

Well this will be a lesson well learned. I'd rather pay someone to fix up my computer from here on and not return my computer (or basically any electronics that I have a warranty on) cause they don't do SHIT. Or they screw things up even worse (like in my case).
So my computer was basically freezing every 10-15 mins and making odd noises (note: I'd only bought it 9 months ago). I took it back, of course, as it was their duty (at least for the 2 years as said in the contract and warranty) , only to have them send it all the way to the capital (that is ~ 600 km from where I live for those of you who aren't familiar with Romania's geography). I agreed to it, hardly, as me and my computer don't do well on our own. J/k I still had my old one around luckily. So as I signed all that darn paperwork, I made sure I wrote under "special terms" that I want my computer back in one piece, with all the data saved and if that was too much work for those lazy asses (I have a 320 GBs hard drive), I wrote that I had to have at least my D: partition. All in all it took them exactly 2 weeks to get me back my computer, and with the long timing I thought they might have actually tried to save my files and it took them too long. Well when I got home, I had absolutely nothing on my computer. Except for a crappy ass trial version of XP (sp3 on top of things) and lots and lots of free space, because those asshats didn't save a single file from my computer.
So there it went... 6 months worth of work and about 500$ worth of purchased stock... all gone in the blink of an eye so to speak.

Morala: nu va luati nimic de la Depozitul de Calculatoare ca-s niste tampiti. Multam.

Wallpaper Textures Set 2

5 textures at 1024x768. Had them for a while, just haven't gotten around to posting them really. Haven't been on here much. Or anywhere else actually =D
Well w/e. Enjoy :)

Download Wallpaper Textures 2