Sky 157 - this evening

Not sure where I am with the whole number of skies thing, but I'm pretty sure I'm caught up now.

Sky 156 - earlier today

Sky 155 - lazy

Sky 154 - another pre-Irene

Sky 153 - after Irene

Sky 152 - pre-Irene

This doesn't look very stormy to me. It did rain after I took this shot but not stormy rain. And now we wait for Irene.

Sky 151 - rainy and sketchy

Real stormy sky with simulated rain (a standard Photoshop action).

The pen sketch filter happened to be at a good setting. Sort of a Richard Gorey thing happening.

I hope you'll forgive my recent laxity (re: missed days). I know I do.

Sky 150 - ack

I know I missed yesterday. I don't care.

Sky 149 - "real" clouds

Thanks to N-sane for this tutorial on how to make real clouds in Photoshop. All I had to add was a plane.

Sky 148 - lamp light

Sky 147 - surprising

Not optically surprising. Surprising how little time (about 5 minutes) it takes to render this level of complexity. 

I don't like the rocks. Sometimes I enjoy the inanity of the computer's understanding of rocks. Not this time. I'd like them rounder. I tried smoothing them but that didn't work. The rounded one in the background is a random stone. Well, I guess I could duplicate that one or make variations or just keep on generating stones until I have enough rounded ones. But it's about the sky.

Sky 146 - simple

Sky 145 - evening

Sky 144 - related to sky font

Kind of like rain and that comes from the sky. You can buy the font and have it spell out your own words in your browser.

Sky 143 - lightning

Sky 142 - smoky

The Great Dismal Swamp burns.

Sky 141 - volcanic

Sky 140 - fluffy

Current Fads
Listening. Harvest Moon, Neil Young; cat crunching dog food
Watching. The Bicycle Thief (1972); Twelfth Night (1969 - ITV version)
Activity. working
Gadget. none
News Source. the news feeds in Safari
Reading. Busy Body - M.C. Beaton; Second Sight - Sepharial; Communicating With Spirits - Rita Berkowitz and Deborah Romaine; The Wisdom of No Escape - Pema Chodron. Just finished: The Wee Free Men - Terry Pratchett
Writing. morning pages, blog posts, and two modules in a curriculum guide

Sky 139 - waking up

Sky 138 - halfish moon (waxing)

Although the moon is this size ...

this is how it looks to me.

Sky 137 - ugly boxes

In which I make a bland sky and some objects with moderately subtle lighting, including a blob that's supposed to be amber. I turned on blurred reflections. I don't like it. Not here anyway. The reflection on the metal cube is too blurred and the shadow of the amber on flattened cylinder is too strong. I suspect that with a bunch of tweaking and manipulation I could get what I prefer. 

Sky 136 - wiggly

This is the strange night sky with fog removed and stuff thrown in. Unsettling.

Removing the haze and covering the ground plane with water cut the render time to a quarter of what it was. Good to know.

Sky 135 - banded night

As Illustrator and ton of other applications have discovered in the past, Bryce has issues with gradients. Difficult to fix in Photoshop as the value of the dim stars is too close to the moon shine sky. And, no, I'm not about to spend an hour blurring it by hand. I did enhance a few stars, though. That sort of reality matters.

Sky 134 - lack

Proving that you can either get the landscape or the sky, not both, unless you make some adjustments. Maybe in Photoshop?

Sky 133 - softies

In typical Elaine fashion, I have created a sky after giving up on making my own skies. Mostly, so I could play around with the Illustrator "soft" palette. It is actually clouds that I like about skies. They are the eyes of the skies, betraying feelings and harboring portents. Although, these are more like blobs than clouds. Oh, well.

Sky 132 - i give up

This vector sky is lovely. So lovely I'm giving up the whole idea of ever making my own skies.

Click on the image and you can buy it from shutterstock.

Sky 131 - striated

Sky 130 - happy movie skies

In contrast to the HP 7.1 skies, are the skies of "Nottinghill" or the lack of skies. It is a very bright movie and sunny skies are implied more than seen. Here are a couple.

The sky over the Ritz as William goes to meet Anna Scott, the famous actress.

Anna is troubled and goes to see Will. Things are uncertain. One of the few cloudy skies in the movie.

My favorite sequence is watching six months of weather compressed into two minutes as Will walks through Nottinghill. There is fall rain followed by winter snow, followed by spring blooming. Skies implied, not seen. From dark to light as Will gets through the time without Anna.

My theory is that expansive sky is for mood movies. Perhaps I'll discuss some of that here. Let's see how it goes.

Sky 129 - another random

From the Bryce randomizer.