Eon Works - Desktop wallpapers and Fantasy art posters

2D Valley interview

I'm glad to announce that in May 2008 I have been chosen by 2DValley.com to be a Featured Artist of the month. I therefore have been interviewed by Christa, the editor of the site. We talk about a lot of things including how I work, my own favorite artwork, my favorite artists, how it is to run your own art business, and other interesting things. Here is a link to the interview.

Logo design gallery

I just added a new gallery to showcase my logo designs. There is a variety of the better logos I did during the past several years for all kinds of projects. Different styles for different purposes. If you like what you see and are in need of a cool logo design for your website, band, or anything else just email me the details and I'll get back to you with a price quote within 24 hours.

Psychedelic art trip

I was thinking for some time about doing a cool psychedelic picture. Eventually I decided to dedicate a whole weekend to it and initiated the process one Friday afternoon. It was time for another atmospheric journey.

To get myself in the mood I started by listening to one of my favorite psychedelic ambient albums "Mystical experiences" by "The Infinity Project". It's one of those classic down tempo ambient albums that gets you out there... not exactly to the "Sound becomes color and color becomes sound" dimension, but to a certain unique state of mind that is under heavy influence of the music.

So while absorbing all those enigmatic trance vibes, I started getting ideas how to create a hallucinogenic multi-dimensional visual experience in 2D format. After exploring several concepts I set for a visual fusion of colorful waves and organic patterns engaged in a spiral movement toward a source of light. Later I added several orbs to create a greater sense of depth and motion. It all ended up working quite well.

Article update - Healthy eating habits

It's been now over 3 years since I wrote the Healthy eating habits article and yesterday I decided it was time for an update. Actually I have been making minor updates to it on a regular basis, but yesterday I went through the whole article and made many small improvements. The core ideas remain the same, I simply improve parts of the article that need better explanation. If you read the article when I first put it online, I recommend that you read it again to get a more complete picture of my recommendations.

Yesterday I also sorted the list of "Things to do or emphasize" from the most to less important. This should be very helpful to those who may be wondering what to start with.

I noticed that nearly 100 sites are linking to this article and looking at my web stats it's the most popular article on Eon Works. I therefore decided to put a date stamp at the top of the article to indicate when the article was updated. Finally, as some people have asked about this after reading the article, here is the quick sauerkraut recipe that I use.

Free content and bending over backwards

Every now and then I get a comment or email form people asking why I don't provide all my images for free. Some are even requesting that I should remove my logo from the images and provide high-resolution images. I actually wrote a bit about this earlier, but let me write once more to clarify my thoughts on this topic.

I used to think that only immature teenagers who live with mom and dad and never had to work for a living could make such requests. Now it seems that some of these people are actually adults and I think I can see their line of thinking.

On the outset it seems that a lot of stuff online is free: images, articles, software, services, etc. But the truth is that very little worth having is really free. Most "free" stuff is wrapped in ads, a paid premium service or some other mechanism that in one way or another, directly or indirectly profits the original value creator or provider. The consumer is of course paying for this "free" stuff if not with his money than with his attention, time, effort, hassle, and privacy.

How many times did you download a "free" piece of software that had spyware/adware/viruses in it? Usually you don't know that because these things are invisible unless you start looking for them. And how much time did you waste removing all the nastiness? How about newsletter sign ups that only get you even more spam? Or how often did you download "free" images from sites that provide copyrighted images they never got permission to distribute in the first place? How about when you signed up for some free service only to find out later that all the better parts of the service require a payment?

Obviously there are quality content providers that can be trusted. But there is a good share of those you can't trust. Although the ones that can be trusted often charge money for some of their content or service, at least you are not being tricked or taken advantage of.

I have a free content section where anybody can enjoy my artwork in the form of computer wallpapers or a screen saver. Actually, a lot of people use the small images from my gallery as their desktop background and that is fine by me. Some of my fans buy my images as posters, a license, or computer wallpapers and this creates a mutually beneficial win-win situation - I receive payment for providing extra value for the fans. This encourages me to crate more and by doing so keeps the fans happy.

But some people apparently like my work a lot yet don't want to give anything back, and only want to take. They want me to give all my work away for free. Steve Pavlina, who is perhaps the most successful blogger online today, wrote about this issue recently in one of his blog posts:

"...you'll surely have to deal with cynics who whine and complain that you've somehow joined the dark side, as if you've done them serious personal harm by deciding to get paid for your work instead of bending over backwards to serve their needs for free. Understand that cynics aren't offering you a fair exchange - they're asking you to commit to an abusive relationship.

Cynics hold the nonsensical belief that they're entitled to something for nothing. They want you to serve them, while they offer you nothing in return. "

I make a living working as a freelance artist. Which means I live through lean times and moderate times. And since the income my site generates helps with the lean times, I can't give its content away for free.

To be frank, even if I could have given my work away for free I wouldn't because I did that in the past and know where that leads to. From the mid 1990s to 2004 I used to freely share all my images as hi-res wallpapers and this is what it got me: I started to see parts of my images, cut out, appear in other "artists" artworks; on many occasions I've seen others earning money from my images without me knowing anything about it; I've seen my signature replaced by somebody else's; there was even a person who claimed to be the true author of all my artwork and wanted to sue me when confronted with it.

These are the unfortunate side effects of sharing too much online today. I've learned from my mistakes. Now I share just enough so everybody can see and enjoy my work, but not enough to exploit it. It's a simple matter of cause and effect.

New abstract art - Drifting planes

Just added a new image to the abstract gallery. I especially like the combination of cool and warm colors, along with the neat rectangular shapes. It has a calm and pleasant look of countless drifting planes in a synthetic stream of colorful rectangularity.

New space art: Ancient giants

It's been a while since I posted a new image so I thought about starting the new year with a fresh and crispy space art. I don't have a description for this image yet. Any suggestions are welcome.

Classic Vintage Paperbacks

I just found another site full of cool vintage book covers. As the site's introduction says: "If you love vintage paperbacks, you have come to the right place. There are over 800 images of paperback books on this website." And it includes a Classic Sci-Fi Paperback Covers section. And the covers by artist section contains rare covers by Frank Frazetta. Several of which I have never seen before. Another artist whose covers I in particular like are in the Tom Adams Cover Art section.

I love the lettering, the often bleak almost washed out colors, and the feel and look of those classic covers. A very nice site.

24 free avatar pictures

I just added a new page to the free section - a nice collection of free avatars that you can use on forums, chat rooms and any other social networks. All images are 150x150 and saved in JPG file format. You can resize and convert to whatever format you need. Please do not link to these avatars directly (it uses too much bandwidth), instead upload them to wherever you want to use them.

On another note I finished working on the Surreal and Abstract wall calendars, available in two sizes - regular and oversized. They look very nice and make a good Christmas gift.

Archive of SciFi and Fantasy magazine cover art

I recently came across a very nice site called Visco - "a visual catalogue of the cover art of the science fiction, fantasy, weird and horror fiction magazines from the early twentieth century to the present day." Frankly, this site is quite a gold mine for anybody into SF and Fantasy cover art like myself. There are in total 3631 images from 100 titles/editions. All cataloged by artist and magazine name. It's very interesting to see how the style, and the art tools, changed over time. I just wished the images were bigger. Check out these rare images by Chris Foss and John Harris and Tim White and Bruce Pennington. They sure bring back some memories.

Space art wall calendar now available

I just finished working on the Space wall calendar. This new calendar contains 12 Space images that represent my best work in this genre. I made sure to include the very popular Planet scape which continues to outsell all my other images. Once you see the calendar images I think you will agree that I made a very good selection. Check out this cool pic:

Like last year I have two sizes available - regular and oversized. In oversized mode each page measure 17" x 11" (43cm x 28cm), or 17" x 22" (43cm x 56cm) when hung on wall. The regular size measure 8.5" x 11" (21.5cm x 28cm) when folded, and 11" x 17" (28cm x 43cm) when hung on wall. Both sizes contain the same images which I personally selected. The regular is $19.99 and oversized $29.99. It makes a nice gift that helps keep track of important dates.

New license for Non-Commercial use of my artwork

I regularly receive emails from people asking me if they can use my artwork for non commercial purposes and how much that would cost. Until now I was simply recommending to buy a license which used to be $150 per image. But, paying $150 for an image that you only want to use privately as a wallpaper or a CD cover is very pricey. I therefore decided to change my image licensing policy. I now offer two types or licenses: Non-Commercial @ $10/image, and Commercial @ $100/image.

The Non-Commercial license allows for private/family/educational use of the purchased image(s) in a non commercial manner. The license allows you to use the image(s) as-is and does not permit redistribution. Thus, you can not modify the image(s) itself in any way like changing colors, painting on top of it, or mixing it with other images. You can however put your logo, or other writing, on top of it if used as a CD/DVD cover.

Images sold under this license are available at 2048 pixels wide resolution (or 1536 pixels high if the image is higher than wider), and are 2-3MB each. Such resolution is fine for printing CD/DVD covers or small posters, and high resolution wallpapers. To ensure maximum visual quality every image is stored in a PNG file format.

If you intend to use the purchased image(s) as a wallpaper your can always scale the image down to your preferred screen resolution (though most modern operating systems do this automatically when you set the image as your desktop background).

To order simply go to the gallery and locate the image(s) you like and add them to cart (located below each image). The ordering process is secure and supports all major credit cards. Once your payment has been verified, you will receive via email: a high resolution version of the ordered image(s), a License Agreement document, and an Invoice as proof of your legal right to use the image(s).

The Commercial license is for any project/product that you intend to sell to earn profit. The price starts at $100 US per image and depends on the amount of work I put into making it, and the purpose of its use. To ensure maximum visual quality each image is saved in a PNG file format. Images sold under this license are available at 4000-6000 pixels wide resolution and range in size from 10-90MB. Upon ordering a link will be send to you via email pointing to the hi-res image.

If you'd like to purchase a commercial license, simply send me an email writing which image(s) you are interested in and where/how they will be used. I will then email you back a price within 24 hours. My prices are very flexible depending on purpose and the amount of images you'd like to purchase.

6 quality articles on how to design your art website

Not too long ago I wrote a post entitled How not to design your art website. That post was inspired by Charley Parker's entertaining blog post describing the state of many artists websites. Now Charley went ahead and wrote a series of really good articles on how to go about creating your website properly. So far there are six articles in the series:

These are all well written and thorough articles. He has worked as a professional web site designer for 12 years and it shows. You won't find here any buzz, hype, or cute quick fix me solutions. The main focus is on learning the fundamentals of the relevant technologies and not getting dependent on any custom solutions that may be easy initially, but eventually prove to be trouble in the long term.

These articles are a great starting point for those artists who want to independently establish a long term, solid online presence without reliance on any third party for "add that new picture for me" or "fix/update that page/feature", etc. With the help of these articles, and practice, you should be able to do all such things yourself, and a lot more. And trust me, in the long term such skills will save you a ton of time, hassle, increase your online visibility and future earning potential.

SciFi and Fantasy 2008 Wall Calendars available

In the past I had one calendar for sale which contained a selection of images from different galleries. This works well for most people, but if somebody doesn't like images from certain gallery he would have to endure them for a few months each year. Therefore I decided to start offering calendars based on images from each gallery, and a combined one as usual.

I started with the SciFi and Fantasy (combined) wall calendars. The SciFi calendar contains my best images from the SciFi gallery and the Fantasy one contains a selection of different images from all galleries as I don't have enough images in the Fantasy gallery for its own calendar.

Like last year I have two sizes available - regular and oversized. In oversized mode each page measure 17" x 11" (43cm x 28cm), or 17" x 22" (43cm x 56cm) when hung on wall. The regular size measure 8.5" x 11" (21.5cm x 28cm) when folded, and 11" x 17" (28cm x 43cm) when hung on wall. Both sizes contain the same images which I personally selected.

The regular is $19.99 and oversized $29.99. Next week I plan on finishing the work on the Space, Surreal and Abstract calendars. But for now check out the SciFi and Fantasy calendars.

Great Sci-Fi art books

There are actually not that many books about Sci-Fi art. Fantasy art seems to be much more popular, especially lately due to the LOTR movies. Looking at my art book shelfs I counted 48 books about Sci-Fi and Fantasy art. They are all very good but some are better than others. Here I will list the ones which I think are excellent. They all have been a source of great inspiration to me.

Let's start with the visual futurist - the legendary concept designer and illustrator Syd Mead. He is probably best known for his Sci-Fi designs done for movies such as Blade Runner, Aliens, 2010, and Tron. His work is simply spectacular! Especially the environment and vehicle designs are phenomenal. I spend countless hours studying his work very closely and with great pleasure. His attention to detail and the ability to illustrate unique designs that flow in beautiful harmony with the environment is matched by few. Unfortunately all of his books are out of print, but you should be able to find used ones on Amazon or eBay. I cannot recommend the following ones highly enough: Sentury, Oblagon, Kronoteko, and Kronovecta. If you are a hard Sci-Fi art buff you'll love them!

The Star Wars art books. I have several of them and I browsed through many more at local book stores. There are primarily two Star Wars artists that I especially like: Ralph McQuarrie and Doug Chiang. Ralph McQuarrie worked on the older SW movies and Doug Chiang on the recent ones. Both artists are fantastic in their own way. Doug for his fresh and new design ideas and Ralph for creating the look of the first three SW movies. The ones I recommend are The Art of Star Wars - Episode 1 and Episode 5 .

Back in the late 80s I had this habit of going to book stores just to look at Sci-Fi and Fantasy book covers. Infact that is how I discovered and became a fan of Chris Moore, a British illustrator particularly known for his Sci-Fi work. He has created cover artwork for books written by many famous science fiction writers. What I especially like about Moore's Sci-Fi artwork are the vivid, beautiful colors and the somewhat bulky looking hardware designs. One extra cool thing about Journeyman The Art of Chris Moore is that it contains one long interview with the artist, which can give you many unique insights into the life of a long time Sci-Fi illustrator.

Infinite Worlds - The Fantastic Visions of Science Fiction Art is a compilation of 700 images from some of the best Sci-Fi book and magazine covers. It includes a brief history of the genre, and short biographies of more than 100 artists. Although some respected artists are not included, like Chris Foss, this is possibly the best wide range resource for anybody interested in SciFi art and the artists behind it. There are many hard to find images in this book. Some of the older artists don't have a website or little of their work is on the web. Making this book an even more valuable source on the fantastic worlds of Sci-Fi art.

How to reduce computer eye strain

As many people do I often spend long hours in front of the computer. This can be tough on the eyes if one is not careful. During my 20 years of computer use I worked out a series of habits and techniques that help minimize that strain. I'm sure you will also find them helpful:

Low contrast work environment. I light my workspace with a 2 x 60W lamps so my workspace is evenly lit and the contrast between the monitor and the rest of the room is minimal. I position the lamps in such a way so each pans directly at the wall it stands next to and is placed slightly behind the line of the monitor. The light bounces off the walls and this produces a nice soft ambient illumination. I found that the lower the contrast between the room and the monitor the less strain is put on the eyes. But, you can try the opposite and sit in a dark room and look onto a bright PC display. You will get quickly tired in your eyes.

Refresh rate. This refers to how often the screen is being updated. I found the best refresh rate to be between 85 Hz and 120 Hz on CRT monitors. If your screen is flickering, it's probably due to low refresh rate. You can adjust this by right clicking on the desktop and locating the appropriate tab.

High quality cables. Low quality cables that connect your computer and the screen can cause massive interference like vertical or horizontal bars, blurred fonts, and similar. So if you are having such problems replacing the cables might be an easy solution (no need to buy a new monitor yet). Finally, as each additional connector degenerates the signal don't use extension cords. Use a longer cable instead.

Use quality monitor and graphic card. Don't buy cheap clones or other low cost solutions. They don't last long and often have problems with higher refresh rates at higher resolutions. It's better to invest in something more expensive that will last you much longer and provide better functionality.

Take frequent breaks. I take mine every 30 minutes. A few minutes off the screen is usually sufficient for shorter breaks. Actually, my daily routine is structured in such a way that I get 2 - 3 longer breaks each lasting 30 - 45 minutes. These are when I cook and eat food, which is a natural break every 3 hours or so.

Relax your eyes. There are many ways to do that. I developed a simple and effective method that consists of two steps. First gently massage your muscles around the eye sockets, including the area just around the eye itself. This typically takes me up to a couple of minutes. Then I sit back (or lie down) in a relaxed position and put a piece of dark blanket (or whatever will work) over my face so no light can pass through. I close my eyes and consciously relax my eyes and muscles in my whole body. This is great for eliminating muscle tension and after about 15 minutes my eyes feel refreshed and relaxed.

Lower the screen contrast. If you work with graphics or frequently view images onscreen you should properly adjust your gamma settings. This is important. Otherwise the images you see may look too dark or too bright, and the colors may not be as they were intended to be seen. However, if you primarily use your computer for text based activities, like reading and writing, you can lower the monitor brightness/contrast and reduce the monitor color temperature to around 6000. I have two main computers. One for art and the other for doing text based activities (email, internet, programming, research, etc), and the difference is big. You can adjust these through the front panel of your monitor.

Adjust your onscreen working environment. Basically, I adjust everything I see on screen to be easy on the eyes. Window layout style, desktop background, fonts (color, type and size), background/foreground colors, etc. Antialiased black fonts on a light grey background works best for me.

Stay healthy. There is no substitute for that. Eating a healthy diet that consists of natural and minimally processed or whole foods, regular exercise and a good nights sleep is essential for proper body function.

Finally, there are the very obvious ones like avoiding reflections and glares on the screen, minimize repetitive computer work (automate as much as you can), and avoid fluorescent lights.

All these simple adjustments can help keep your eyes rested. I think if you try any of these you will notice an improvement. Try one at a time to see how they work for you. They work well for me.

New space image: Globular cluster

I was suppose to post a new space picture some 2 weeks ago. Unfortunately I got severely delayed by one of my programming projects. I'm usually good at estimating time frames but sometimes things end up taking a lot longer than planned. And since I was quite deep into it, I didn't want to break the mental flow and start working on something entirely different. (I generally don't like multitasking between larger projects.)

Anyway, about a week ago I decided to paint a space image depicting something I haven't done before - a Globular Cluster. A globular cluster is a closely packed system of stars in a somewhat spherical form. Globular clusters typically consist of thousands to millions of old stars and can be several hundred light-years in diameter. There are about 150 currently known globular clusters in the Milky Way.

Lots of sweet colors in this one :)

How not to design your art website

I know that a lot of artists are visiting these pages and many have their own websites with galleries of artwork. So this post will be especially useful to those who either have, or plan to have, a website with their artwork on it.

Whenever I browse other artists websites I frequently run into many usability issues like: flash only, odd navigation graphics, color combinations that make the text and links difficult to read, tiny fonts, tiny obscure thumb crops, too many pop-up windows, incompatibility issues, lack of navigational structure, broken links, etc.

The thing is that the less user friendly your site is the less exposure you'll get. It's a simple matter of cause and effect. Most people are busy and/or impatient. They want things to work quickly and easily. If a site is difficult to use, it only gets in the way and the visitor leaves for other sites to browse.

I've seen this happen over and over in life. If something is easier to use, it often wins over a more difficult solution, even if the easy solution is inferior in any other way. In other words, you may have great artwork but if your site is not user friendly, you will likely loose (clients, fans, traffic, etc.) to those sites with better site usability even if their artwork is not as good as yours.

Designing a good, user friendly site is a lot of work and requires specialized knowledge. You can either do it yourself or hire a professional. Hiring a reputable professional is usually the best option, unless you are the do-it-yourself type like I am. There is a third popular option however, and that is to use pre-made templates with a popular content management system. This is the cheapest and easiest option, with virtually no technical knowledge required, and usually with good usability by default.

I got inspired to write this post after reading the How Not to Display Your Artwork on the Web by Charley Parker on his lines and colors blog (an informative art blog by the way). His post made me laugh several times - it's spot on! It's a good place to find out if your art site is not user friendly. A couple of other good general website design resources are usability.gov and Criteria for optimal web design. And here is a list of free and commercial content management systems. Finally, whatever solution you choose for presenting your artwork online, keep in mind the KISS principle.

Fantastic Visions - a free screen saver

I spent the past few days on creating my first screen saver and just finished it. It contains a nice collection of my work - 12 images in total that will help you, and your screen, relax and take it easy. It's free of viruses/adware/spyware/etc. Its just a screen saver, nothing else. To install it, simply download the screen saver to your computer and double click on it. It runs on Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP platform. Under preferences you can configure a variety of settings like transition effects (there are 30 to choose from), length of time each image is displayed, and many others. Download it now (1.8Mb) and enjoy a cool visual fusion of Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Space, Surreal and Abstract imagery - all in one screen saver.

By the way, the next project on my plate is a new space image. I'm not entirely sure yet about what it's going to be, but I was thinking about a see-in-space type of image with planets, stars and nebulas. So stay tuned for more updates :)

New Abstract image: Uncharted realm

A sunset in unknown realm of liquid land. A very colorful, warm and cool combination of shapes and form in this abstract picture.

The benefits of using RSS

During the past few years a new web technology has been gaining in popularity - RSS. Really Simple Syndication is a data feed format used to publish digital content in a standard way. RSS is especially popular on blogs and news sites which are frequently updated with new content.

By subscribing to an RSS feed of a particular site the user doesn't have to check that site as often, or at all, for new content. All site news are brought to the user via his RSS reader. This is especially useful if you are regularly checking many sites to see if they have been updated with new content. With RSS your reader does that for you and downloads the news if there are any. This saves time, effort, and bandwidth.

The other main benefit of using RSS feeds is that they are free of spam, viruses, and are more private. Unlike email newsletters, the user is in total control of unsubscribing and does not have to reveal any private information, like an email address in order to subscribe to a feed. There is no reliance on some other party to remove you from the feed.

There are two types of RSS feeds: partial and full. Full feeds deliver the whole news item, while partial feeds deliver only a headline and typically the first few sentences of the news item.

I implemented a full RSS feed for this site (see the orange icon on the top right) a few months ago and it's working nicely. So if you'd like to stay more current and be notified on every news item as soon as I wrote it - subscribe to my RSS feed.

In contrast with my newsletter, which I send out about once a month and is a collection of recent news, the RSS feed will bring you the latest news item as soon as I update my website with it. So if you set your RSS reader to check for news once daily, you'll get the news item the same day I wrote it. Some email clients have a built-in RSS reader, so check your email software for RSS capability. For more information check RSS explained and if you are not sure about which reader to use RSS readers.

New Fantasy image: After the battle

A depiction of a warrior during a moment of reflection after a tough and bloody battle... I started this painting back in 2003 after a difficult period in my life. I worked on it for a couple of weeks and then almost totally forgot about it until recently. Although I never found the inspiration to finish it, I think it's good enough to be in the gallery. Hope you like it. Painted in Photoshop.

Free Sony PSP wallpapers

I just expanded the FREE section with 12 wallpapers for the Sony PSP handheld game console. They are all 480x272 and fit perfectly on the PSP screen. Just save them to your computer and transfer to the PSP using a Memstick or a USB cable. You will need the 2.0 (or higher) software update to use wallpapers on the PSP desktop.

New Sci-fi image: Desert outpost

My first Sci-Fi picture in a long time. In fact the last time I did one was back in 2003 (X2 flight). From 1999 to 2005 I've done so much Sci-Fi work for computer games that I got burned out Sci-Fi wise. I needed a break to recover. Some two years later I'm now slowly getting back on track and plan on doing more Sci-Fi images.

Working on this piece reminded me how much I enjoy doing Sci-Fi art when not pressured by deadlines and all the other "necessary evils" associated with working for hire. It's a totally different experience.

Anyway, I wanted to do something not too complex. So I thought of an outpost in a barren landscape with a warm, late evening atmosphere. As you can see the setting is in a dual sun system with two moons, which actually don't pick up much of the sun on the horizon - it looks better that way :) The air vehicles are on a routine patrol flying from outpost to outpost making sure everything is OK. I especially like the mood here. A sunset in a desert environment with a massive giant structure in the middle of nowhere...