A commentary on the development of the "starlitflashes" graphic (click graphic for larger view)

		This was the original concept for the starlitflashes graphic I created several months ago while messing around with various ideas with Clara. She didn't actually ask me to make this graphic for her; instead, I felt inspired one afternoon and wanted to create something that I saw in a dreamscape I'd dreamed a few nights earlier. The words "starlit flashes" gives me a vision of serenity, of being on the seashore at night with the full moon lighting the water in a silver glow. I imagined stars filling the sky, and silver light as far as the eye could see. I used a template for the ocean from jbell.com, and then added in a single astronomical photographic plate of the night sky, added haze and a few other things, and then set the moon into the sky.
		I created this image almost immediately after the first one, thinking that a brighter starfield would be better for something I was going to call "starlit flashes". I added in a second photographic plate of the night sky, and increased the opacity of the plates over the hazed-out sky. The sky became more black, but all of a sudden the image lost the dream-like quality I wanted, and took on a more space-fantastic sci-fi quality... which I did not want for this graphic. Everything was brighter in this image, but I didn't like it. I liked the dreamy haze. Also, Clara had me replace "an online journal by Clara J. Kim" with "beauty, truth, inspiration", which is her theme for her journal.
		Finally, after working the image a few more times, I came up with this one. I felt that this one conveyed the same stunning effect as the second one, while retaining the serene feeling of the first one. I retained the use of the second photographic star-plate on this one, but increased the luminosity a bit to create a better haziness to the graphic. In the end, what I ended up with was my vision of the starlit flashes dreamscape. Through this whole design process, the font we used was Clara's favorite font, "Oklahoma" at 45pts. The first three graphics were all roughly 600x400 pixels in size, because I was designing this graphic on a monitor set at 800x600 with Ulead Photoimpact. My musical inspiration was the end theme to Final Fantasy VIII, composed by Nobuo Uematsu.
		Although this image appears smaller in this thumbnail, it is not. This is the first re-design of the graphic I did since moving to this computer. I used Photoshop 5.5 at a new screen resolution of 1600x1280 on a 22-inch monitor, so the old-style 600-pixel-wide graphic now seemed just way too small. Clara exhibited a desire to re-design her site, so I decided to completely re-do the graphic from scratch, and this is what I came up with. I changed the font style to Kunstler script, to try adding classiness, but in the end I decided that Oklahoma looked better. I also wanted to make the moon bigger and more stunning... but in the end, what I ended up doing was creating something that looked like the glowing orb under the whale-song toilet-paper-roll alien ship in Star Trek 4. So, this was scrapped quickly.
		I rebuilt the image from scratch again, and this time I came up with something that reminded me a lot of the final version of the 600-pixel size image... except in an 800-pixel format (which was what I wanted in the first place). I lowered the intensity of the starfield, and reduced the moon back down to its original size and made it more hazy than bright. I felt as if I had achieved the proper dreamlike quality that I was trying to achieve, and I added to the text effect by slightly beveling it to give it a bit of three-dimensional standout, and then I gave the text a slight outer glow to make it appear luminescent. In the end though, Clara was bothered by my mistake in making the moon oddly-shaped... so I scrapped this one too.
		Finally, I made a design that we both felt was worthy. This version became the final version of the starlitflashes graphic. I rebuilt this one from scratch, using three photographic plates at a opacity of 35%. I graduated the haze from the moon in increments, so that the whole sky would not be hazy, but instead the haze would be created by the moonlight. I increased the moon size some more, and cranked up the luminosity to make the moon appear extremely bright while maintaining the hazy look of the background sky. I added more glow width and intensity to the text, so that even the text would give the feeling of "starlit flashes". In the end, I am satisfied with this version. Thank you for your time. Please come again!