As of this month I have been a member of DA for 2 years and 2 months. I have, however not been considerably active. Every now and then I would pay a brief visit to scan through the various deviancies that tickled my fancy, but at last I have decided to upload some of my old (and new) works.

So for those who are interested, this is what I've uploaded from my past:

"To Escape From My Selection"
A photo a took of myself a couple of years ago for a project on photo-manipulation entitled "The Voyage Series". The idea of this project was to use photos taken of myself, friends and family and, for the want of a better phrase: "Remix" them. The theme for the remixing was very specific...trippy!
(I hope if there are any Porcupine Tree fans out there, they have made the connection.)
Anyway, this particular piece was one of only two out of roughly 9-10 that survived the destruction of my former PC, the other is my slightly down-sized DA profile avatar.
This was a rather important photo to me as it was one of my first pieces of photo manipulation, but more importantly - my first use of layers. This may not seem so evident, as personally I consider this one of the finest examples of my layer work.

"...Have Come For Your Husbands"
Not exactly what you'd call my past, but apart from the last, the oldest I've uploaded.
Last year, me and friend Joe started work on our band's 4th and 5th albums. I remember we were walking back to Joe's house in Neston after going to the chippy, we were thinking of names for the album and I thought it'd be a good idea to honor IEM's krautrock-inspired masterpiece "IEM Have Come for Your Children" by giving our 4th album name and art a tongue-in-cheek reference to the album. The Husbands is a tribute to an old teacher of ours, a one "Mrs Mulvey", who schoolyard rumour would have it, was a widow. Myself and Joe, being the sickos that we are, decided to spread a wicked rumour that she had murdered him...the rest is history.

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In recent weeks, my desire to create photo art has sprung back to life and I have worked my arse off to create and upload 5 brand new pieces of my photo editing!
So, the rundown:

"Mirror of the Soul"
A few weeks ago I had a rather crazy idea to get back in to photo editing, my desire however was slightly given a kick in bollocks by this rather abismal piece of editing. The idea was there but the final product lacked the quality I was looking for. As it says in the description, I wanted to create a bleak and twisted piece out of something cheerful and bright, this was achieved as far as I can see but...it's shite. However, this was another first, as this was the first time I'd used my now regular "Displacement Map" technique, a tool available from the software I use. Now it would take a while to explain what it does in full (and to be honest I probably couldn't explain it!) but I use the technique to create a texture layer on my photos, paste them onto the image I'm working on and create a blend effect (Usually some sort of screening or overlay). This has proven to be very useful and in this photo I used it to create a bubbling "Crawling under your skin" effect on the image, making it look rather gut-wrenching and twisted.

"Through the Window of Your Room"
After the ill-fortunate business of the previous image, I persevered and created this. At first, this started as some random displacing I was doing to some images (to see what I could come up with), I took a photo Joe had taken on his phone of a bridge in Neston (The old sly smoking bridge) and used a preset displacement, the name of which I can't remember and it reminded me of the opening of a cave from the inside. After much work on illumination, texture, colour and brightness adjustment, I finally got it looking briefly like a cave. However if you've looked at the picture before hand, that last part may have been a shock to you, because I've shown a few people this and thus far, hardly any of them guessed it was cave!
I realised my skills were limited so I decided to swallow my pride and distort the image, make it somewhat subtle, suggestive even. However, the art suffered greatly because of this, it needed something else - a human presence - and some emotion. So I looked through my documents to see what I had and hey presto - I had a picture of Aerith from FF7 (Not too sure where it came from!) and after much much work, she was there in that cave, isolated and distanced from the world...

"Enter Infinity" & "Break Through the Surface"
Two experiments in layering - creating new layers to change the colours and textures of two photos taken by other artists. The subjects were two of my favourite female vocalists - Sharon Den Adel of Within Temptation and Simone Simmons of Epica. Not much more to it really!

And last but not least, my latest work:

"...From What Makes Us Human"
How could I possibly leave out my favourite little lady, KaRin of Collide!?
I was messing around with displacement layers to get a feel for the photo I was editing and I came across a texture that when blended with KaRin, gave the impression of her arm being hideously illuminated, this gave me a ruddy good excuse to finally experiment with lighting effects. In a nutshel (Because the album I WAS listening to is long finished and I'm nearly half way through the next one!) yes, sorry (blame Glen Duncan for my new found love of digression...) anyway, in a nutshell I tried to create the effect that KaRin was ammassing a large ammount of energy in her arm. But to make this look convincing I had to work hard on projecting the light on to her body and face, I added the almost evaporating smudge on her face for an extra example of the power she was creating.

I could go on for hours about these works of mine, I've purposely left out a lot of the technical detail and nostalgic stories behind some of the works so to not bore you!

Anyway, I hope you, the reader is more enlightened by my late night ramblings. Time for some Age of Kings and much more music!

Over and out, Eru x