The Wizard

I made this for Ivy, and her parents. I came across her most amazing face that has such a mystical quality and got permission to use her face in this art.

It took me about 5 days (and nights) to complete. The monkey is pieced together with about 10 pireces, the snake is several pieces, her dress and body are comprised of too many bits and pieces to remember. The flower vase is comprised of more than 30 pieces and was so much fun to make.

Actually this image was a delight to make, everything went smoothly and it is the very first art piece that I've made using CS4. I had bought CS4 (the Master Edition) several months ago but wanted to wait until I finished the card project before installing. For some reason the new OpenGL features aren't working on Windows XP Professional. I have to find out if it's due to XP or due to the kind of graphics card I have. I also have Vista installed on the same computer, but it's acting up at the moment, keeps restarting after intalling an auto update.

But the fantastic news is that Photoshop CS4 seems to be far more stable than CS3 !!! Yipee !! To test its stability, I purposely tried doing some distortions that used to be a guaranteed way to crash Photoshop on my prior version (ie: I have a layer with a Mask that is grouped to another layer and I Transform / distort it). In a large file that is more than 2 gigs unflattened, CS3 used to crash ... but the operation went as smooth as butter. A complete delight ! The image you see here (viewed at large size) is just 9 percent of the original image size, which is 22 x 30 @ 300 dpi.


Visit jiffyslot's Flickr gallery: www.flickr.com/photos/jiffyslot/

and here is a link to Ivy's face image: www.flickr.com/photos/jiffyslot/2883725557/