Name:      Phil Mills (millsp@gov.on.ca)
File name: PMHWay.jpg & PMMercy.jpg
Program:   Sketch!  (Photoshop for some textures)

Comments:
The technical stuff about these pictures is easy to explain; the "creative"
part may be impossible.  I'll type a few sentences and we'll see.

Each picture was created using Sketch! to model and raytrace all the
objects.  Each was made in two passes...the first for the contained image
and a second for the frame and title plate (and the cartoon balloon in
PMHWay).  The simple textures were created in Sketch! and the more
complex -- bump maps, highway lines, etc -- were drawn in Photoshop.

Now for the hard part....

PMHWay.jpg:
It was late July and I was thinking about alien landscapes.  Sometimes,
the most alien of all is the familiar city around me.  I think that if
a person had absolutely no concept of motor vehicles and looked at an
empty highway, it might appear as some kind of sinister stalking ground
or altar, perhaps.

OK, I read too much Ray Bradbury when I was younger. :-)  But I also
read a lot of Robert Sheckley, so when I thought about Death stalking my
landscape, I also had to think what would Death find alien.  My answer
was, different Deaths.  Equal Opportunity Deaths, couples strolling on
a summer evening, an idea about 3D cartooning...and PMHWay was born.


PMMercy.jpg:
Taken by itself, it's hard to see this picture as having much to do with
the month's topic, but since it came about because of PMHWay (and a lot
of other things), I'm submitting it too.

During the second week of August, as I was putting some finishing touches
on PMHWay, the image of a rose kept slipping into my mind.  Blame it on
the music.  Combining the rose that I wanted to create with the Death
character that I had already made, gave me a mental image of what I had
to do.

So, what's it got to do with landscape?  After I figured out the main
objects I was going to use, I thought for a while about the second half
of the song title, "Death don't have no mercy in this land."  In the end,
the "land" seemed to me to be all lands at once.  To try to express
that, I give you Death looking down on a cloudy, formless, "any" land.

What did you expect, fractal mountains?  :-)