Winter Trees, Livingston

I have just listed my first designer item for sale in There auctions. This is a freestanding picture object for use in a house or zone. It is based on a photograph of mine that I previously used for my 2003 Christmas card in the real world.

Monochrome work in There turns out to be harder than you’d expect, because most places in the world have environmental lighting with a strong colour cast. This doesn’t matter much for colour artwork because the human eye is good at compensating; for monochrome, though, it can produce very ugly effects. My solution to this has been to arrange for the picture and frame textures (but not the ones on the back) to be “unlit” and thus retain their neutral colour and brightness wherever the object is placed. The down-side of this is that the picture glows in the dark, but that seemed like the right tradeoff.

The basic frame model is by Kirmeo, and is one of the free models available from the There Museum of Art. I’ll be donating a copy of the picture to the TMOA’s collection.

The image (click on thumbnail for larger version) shows me looking insufferably smug at getting my first design acceptance.