Here are the results of the presets I created for the glass Eye Candy filter. This particular filter on my machine seems rather dodgy, taking forever to render in the preview panel and occasionally just quitting when I chose it from the Filter menu. As a result I didn't put a lot of re-do time into this one. You might be able to download the presets (with the title GlassPresetsGRC.zip) by clicking here. It will be interesting to see if these presets, which are really just text files, work cross-platform. If you can't download them or they don't work on your machine, let me know and I'll try something else.

Well I ended up making four of these, because the first one Fur, didn't really tile well. There was too much of a border around the fur portion. Also, I wasn't impressed with the way it handled color: it didn't. I added the color with a command-U colorize command. The Waterdrops doesn't tile exactly (yeah, I'm a perfectionist about things like that). That left Swirl and Wood. Wood turned out to be a bit too dark for a background, so what you're looking at is Swirl. However, if I ever need to do shingles for a house, Wood is definitely where I'll be going.

Well, here's a problem I didn't expect. I thought that if I specified Swirl1 as the background picture for this page, that that would take precedence over the background picture in the CSS file. It didn't; so I had to "disconnect" this page from the CSS file. If anyone can provide me with some advice about this, I'd sure appreciate it. Well, I've worked around it by adding a second CSS file, but that's not how inheritance is supposed to work. I know this isn't a CSS class, but if anyone knows what happened here, I'd sure like to learn!

Here's the log horse, done with several different styles of wood to vary the grain direction as would happen with the chest, legs, head and ears. The major problem I had was getting a knot correct, so you'd see the end of the barrel chest, the way you would when you saw across a log.

Well, I couldn't very well have the log horse sitting in the middle of nothing, so I used a couple different Wood grains to provide it with a hardwood floor. But a room has to have walls, so I did a Swirl to make some wallpaper (coloring it with cmd-U). I've always liked rooms with two varieties of wallpaper, so I took a small corner of the pattern, Swirl'd it (seamless tile), defined it as a pattern and filled the lower portion of the wall. That didn't look right, so I copied and pasted it into a new layer, then flipped the new layer horizontal and set the blend mode to Multiply. It still didn't look right, so I used the Shadowlab to have the horse cast a shadow on the wall.

Yep, I spent some time with this one!

Three weapons, three chrome sets. The top is English steel, which is burnished to a shiny white; the dagger is hardened iron, which is greyish; the epée is Damascus steel, which shines brightly because of the folding involved in the manufacturing process.

The top handle is three varieties of glass: emerald, ruby and sapphire. The dagger handle uses the Fur for the horsehair, ruby and sapphire (again) and Chrome Gold for the hand guard. The epée uses two varieties of hair for the leather and ruby (yet once more), with the Star added, then faded to 50%.

The mounting board is obviously wood; the plaques are Chrome with lettering in Nuptial Script and Techno fonts. If I were to do this again, I'd apply what I learned from the epée: do the Nuptial Script and Techno in separate layers until the spacing is right, then merge them. Don't change the font in the middle of a single layer.

Finally, Shadowlab was used to apply the subtle shadow behind each of the weapons.

Here are a four marble tiles. I particularly like the way I can save the presets in EyeCandy, so I was able to easily go back and recreate the exact effect when I made the thumbnail.

I also took the opportunity to experiment with making seamless tiles which were rectangular rather than square, so these may look a bit different.

Corona filter initially used on heart; Chrome on the sword; Glass for the jewels; Water Drops, Drip and finally plain old Distort on the blood. Had to mask off areas initially, because the Corona completely obliterated it. After everything else was completed, another pass of the Corona was made on its own layer, the opacity of which was reduced to let the other layers show through.

Create calendar with marble fill and swirl filters. Add numbers and month, apply effect using only Eyecandy filters. Perhaps I will get to this. We'll see.