Video is in WMV Windows Media Video format, file size is 152 megs. Right click, save to your computer, then play it. Download Flames in Motion 1

http://www.archive.org/details/HighFidelityDemo
A 1080P high def animation.

http://www.archive.org/details/FeXIV (previously unreleased, 2.5GB
high quality flame animation set with modern music, more than 12
minutes long)

http://www.archive.org/details/StarOasis (this is an old one but
previously only available by bittorrent, only 100MB, 5:40 playtime)

There are 365 images contained on this CD, there’s enough artwork to have an original piece of artwork, every single day, for an entire year. Click this image for the full sized preview.

Here's the artwork for the CD.

You can see thumbnails of every piece of artwork that’s on this CD here.

You can get your copy quite a few ways.
You can go to me directly, I can accept paypal by sending payment to the email address steven at hilltopdesign.com
I’m happy to sign and date it for you, and directly from me is the only way to get a signed copy.
Cost is $25.00 per CD, shipping via US Post Office Priority Mail to addresses in the US, add $5.00.

You can stop in at the brand new Owl Tree Gallery in Lenoir City and pick up a copy there. Owl Tree Gallery, 117 East Broadway (past traffic light #16 going toward Loudon, on the right- green wood exterior) in Lenoir City, TN. I’m happy to have my work on display there, this one show has ALL my available artwork in one place, from framed and matted prints, artist trading cards, note cards, trinket boxes, everything.

Or- you can oder directly from the manufacturer here.

The cost is the same, $25.00
These will NOT be signed, they will ship directly from the manufacturer to you. However, this is the best option for using VISA, MASTERCARD, AMERICAN EXPRESS, and DISCOVER CARD. This is also the best option for orders outside the US. You can calculate the actual shipping costs on this page.

This has been one of the most involved projects I’ve ever done, it’s taken two years to get this release created. These were created and rendered specifically for wide screen monitors, like laptops and wide screen LCD monitors, as well as in your digital photo frame. Frames are different from model to model, brand to brand. But you can copy the images to a thumb drive or flash card and put it into your frame. If your frame is wireless enabled, you could set the frame to grab images from your computer, so you could either copy the images to your hard drive.

There are 365 pieces of hand selected artwork. The selection ranges from some of my very earliest pieces to some of my latest works, which are created in a pseudo 3D version of the flame fractal software. I tried to give a good cross section of what I’ve created over the years, and I’m very happy with what this release contains.

For those with a more square shaped monitor, I haven’t forgotten you. You can either stretch the images to fit, or, you can select a different gallery of these same images, but already sized to fit 1024 x 768 pixel monitors. There will be a black bar on the top and bottom edge, so it’ll be like letterbox movies on your TV. Either way, they look good on almost any size monitor or digital picture frame. I’ve loaded these onto some monitors with a huge resolution setting, and they hold up beautifully.

One thing I wanted to mention- purchasing this release on CD allows you to use the images for your own personal use. They’re not to be shared, emailed to friends or family, made available for download on web sites, used on your web site, printed, modified, or used in any other way. You are allowed to use these for your monitor or digital frame. Of course, if you’ve got a computer at home and one at work, I have no problem with you using this artwork in both places.

I do license my work for various uses aside from this release, so use the contact form here to get in touch with me for your specific needs.

I also rendered a loop of a favorite fractal, the Rainbow Hummingbirds, and also did this one in high def size, I’ve compressed it for web viewing as well. Right click, save to your hard drive, and watch it from there. Link

• It’s been a year and a half in the making, but I’ll soon be releasing a CD ROM of my artwork for sale, so you can set my artwork as wallpaper on your computer. These are larger versions than you’ll find in my galleries, and very lightly compressed.  They’re sized for 1280×800 pixel screens, so those of you with wide screen desktops and laptops can  finally view a screen filling image.
• I’m working on setting up an area on my site for people to purchase individual images for wallpaper use, using a micro payment system through PayPal. So if you’re not wanting to spring for the CD ROM release, you can select your favorite pieces À la carte.
• I’ve got a video project I’ve been working on forever, it’ll be a DVD release of animated fractals, to be used as video eye candy, or as a relaxation or meditation video. If I can pull it off, it’ll have music I’ve composed and recorded for the video.
• I’ll soon have my work in a local gallery, run by an artist friend, so I’m really looking forward to seeing how that goes.

There’s always a lot of stuff going on over here, so much so that I can’t seem to find time to update my web sites, but look for some new stuff soon.

I’ll be there for the meet and greet on opening night, which is part of the First Friday events. Opening night is Friday, May 2, from 5 to 9 PM I’ll be available to answer questions you might have about my work.

I’ll be showing a selection of brand new work, and they will be available for purchase through Three Flights Up. I always enjoy meeting people, so come on out and say hi.

Then I googled:
artist clinton TN
1st and 6th ranking

Then I googled:
fractal artist clinton TN
1st ranking
Then I googled:
Steve artist TN
Second place

Then I googled:
Steve fractal
and came in on the 4th result

Clinton fractal pulls me up as the first result.

Googling clinton tn steve comes up with me as the first result. Am I the only Steve in Clinton Tn?

Googling fractal digital clinton pulls me up as the 3rd and 5th result.

Googling fractal clinton  pulls up 7th place.

I’m also finding that this post will appear at the top of the listings, so that’ll help track me down if all you remember is my first name and fractals. Too funny.

Steve and fractal pulls me up. How crazy and generic is that?
Search engine rankings intrigue me to no end, how bizarre.
EDIT: I originally wrote this up a couple of months ago, and since then, rankings have changed. Now let’s see if this post will change the listings.

EDIT: This post is indeed changing the rankings.

First off, there’s an export script. Open a flame pack, then run the script. It writes all the flames as individual paramaters. Dump them into your flam3 directory. Change a few things in an ini file to reflect your settings, then fire up an executable that sits in your toolbar waiting for something to render. When it finishes the first one it finds, it renames the .flame file as a .done file. Then, if you have a SMPT mail server, it can even email you the paramater file, as well as the finished render.

There’s a litle tiny bit more than this, but even at this release, which is currently v 0.6. Unattended batch rendering- this is something that I’ve been dreaming about for quite a few years now. Just dump your exported flame files into a directory, and let it run. The beauty is that if you’ve got a home network, you can shoot files to render boxes and it’s all automated. Now, if I know someone that has a screamer computer and need a fast render, I can send them a zip file with everything pre-configured, have them unzip the folder, run the executable, and then dump the flame file I need rendered into that directory, and it’s hands off, it will email the finished image when it’s done.

If you’re tired of losing paramater files, set up a free Gmail account, then set up the ini file to send the finished render and the parameters to that email address. Then you’ll have off site, indexable, searchable archive of your fractals, as well as the finished renders. Now it’s safe and sound, and easy to get to. If you fill up that account, open a second account and contine making artwork.

How cool is that? It’s very cool, that’s how cool it is.
And when you get finished making high pitched squeee sounds when it does it’s thing, drop him a few bucks via paypal for the effort. He deserves a lot for such a beautiful piece of software. It will save you untold hours if you create and need to render a lot of Apophysis fractals. Dan has been taking people’s suggestions and revising it, and with each release, there’s more to get all giggly about.
You can find all these wonderful things, as well as more info on how it works, right here. LINK to my-fractals.com

These are the currently available designs, which are also available as coasters and framed tiles.

Fantasia	Ghost Spiral
Red #2	Red #1
Panels Purple Orange	Blue Cove
Black White Spirals.	Coils
Coils 2	Brown Spiral
Tall Grasses 1	Julia in Red
Autumn Square	Sunshine
Sea Flower	Seafoam Coral
Angel Wings	Fire Flower
Lotus	Burning Bush
Glass Vessel	Gateway
Peace	Crystal Mass
Inky Strands	And the waters came
Blue Spiral	Golden Angel
Purple Portal	Purple Suncatcher
Hummingbirds	Lemon Twist
Contained

Fractals – The Colors Of Infinity

I created a station around a year ago, which I’ve been fine tuning all along. It was based on the band October Project. Over the last year, I’ve been voting things in and out of the station, and figured I could turn you all on to some cool music you might not have heard before.

You can even make your own station for free- there’s no catch at all, no commercials on the broadcast of the music. It’s not a jukebox, you can’t set it to play a certain song you want to hear right away, but it’s still a very cool thing I’ve been enjoying for a year or so.

So, just click the link, and if you’ve got a zippy internet connection, it’ll stream for you. This is the stuff I listen to night and day as I work on things.

Link to October Project Station

First Friday is a monthly event- galleries stay open late, and it’s a chance to galllery hop to see the new pieces of artwork brought in each month, as well as a chance to meet the artists. So if you’re in the area, stop by and say hi.

Here’s a sneak peek of four of the newest pieces I’ll be debuting at Abode. They’re the first four images in this gallery.

EDIT: I just returned from the opening night, it was a good time. I met with some very cool people. The local TV News guys in town happened to stop by, so of course, I had to talk with them a little. Lord, I just come across badly on video. *cringe* But hey, they got my name right, so it’s all good.

TV Interview snippet

For those of you that also run Word Press, let me clue you in on something weird that’s had me stumped for months. Some directories, like themes for example- I couldn’t delete the folder. I kept getting an error message saying the directory wasn’t empty, or I didn’t have permissions. Also, some themes refused to let me load them in the editor to tweak them- no matter which template file I clicked on, nothing would load except default.css

I finally got to the bottom of it. I’ve been using FireFTP, the ftp client for Mozilla. There’s a checkbox in the preferences section to show invisible files. That was part of the problem- there were invisible files in some folders. The file names were  named .DS_Store

These were apparently inside some zipped themes I’d downloaded. I’m guessing they’re some sort of file left behind by ftp clients? Anyway, they were inside zipped up themes, so search for these files and remove them before you upload them to your server. You’ll save yourself a lot of problems. Also, for some reason, Mac users include mac files in their packaged themes, which also wreak havoc on a PC, as well as on the server. Search through the files before uploading them.

So there you have it- this site has a new look, as does my other site, UnquietVisions.  If you see something gone screwy, please give a holler.

Oh, I also added some goodies to my sites. At the bottom of each post on the main page, you’ll find a link marked Share This. Give it a click- it’ll provide the capability to add the feed to various social bookmarking sites, as well as a way to email the link to that particular page to someone. Also, there’s now a contact form for my sites. You can use them to leave a note, comment, or even to subscibe to my newsletter, which is only used to announce new print releases at Unquiet Visions.

I hope these changes make it easier for visitors to navigate and find things around here.

I’ll be heading over there to drop off a couple more pieces, and I’ll try to take a few photos. It’s such a surreal thing to see something I’ve created on someone else’s walls.

New explorations of fractal forms, no color, just white, black, and shades of grey.

I use black in the background in most of my work, one reason is to hide things in the darkness. Things that aren’t as visually appealing can be hidden in the dark. But this time, the background is a brilliant white, and the entire form of the fractal is exposed, which in some of these images, takes on the appearance of a pen and ink drawing, in others a charcoal pencil. Some of these makes you want to grab your crayons and start coloring. For a change of pace, I thought I’d present the entire form for you to study.

This gallery shows you everything, now you can see the intricate detail of these wondrous things I work with. It’s sort of like throwing on the stage lights and trying to figure out what’s making these shapes, what’s forming them into the patterns you see. Usually you see a portion of the fractals I create, but the main structure is hidden in the smoke and mirrors of the darkness.

This is so different that it gets it’s very own gallery- enjoy!
Shades Of Grey

Now that’s just cool.

This is the extended version. Play it in full screen if your computer can handle it, and turn up the sound, there’s lots of nuances in the background.

My online galleries contain thousands of images, feel free to pay a visit and see the variety of artwork I’ve created.

This is a large download, over 900 megs in size, so please check out the streaming version of it on Google first, which is located here.

If you really want to see it at a larger size, you can grab it here. Feel free to share this video with others, it’s something a lot of people haven’t seen before, and it’s always cool to turn someone onto something new.

I did the editing on this, and also created the music. It was created by assembling dozens of sound clips, which is detailed here, along with mp3 downloads of the various incarnations of the music bed, which I saved in incremental steps as I worked. You can read the details of the music part of it here.

I’ve been cutting bits and pieces and learning quite a bit as I’m experimenting, moving things around, enabling widgets and all sorts of other cool stuff. So if things look weird for a moment, hit refresh, and if I’ve just changed something, it’ll load properly again. Just hit the HOME link found on all the pages. Or, at least, I hope it’s appearing on all the pages. That’s the plan anyway. Send Cheetos.

This is a music video I’ve put together, it’s fractal flames in motion, coupled with music I composed for this project. This is the long version. Fractal Flame Demo Reel- Extended Mix

And, as promised, here’s the shorter version. Fractal Flame Demo Reel- Short Mix

I was invited to showcase some of my artwork in a gallery on the website of Nikola Kitanovic, a well known poet and novelist from Serbia, Yugoslavia.

I’m posting this here as a reference, in hopes that one day I might have a clue as to what he’s referring to. This can all be found here.

To see his “review” of my work, on the right side of the page you see artists- look for Lareau. Clicking the letter I will take you to his review, clicking the letter G will show thumbnails of my artwork.

This is the intro to the artists he has listed, posted here to boost my self esteem when it gets low.

———————-
You can see galleries of some of the most prominent modern painters of the world. The mission of this section is to grow, in time, into an anthology of modern painters of the world. I would like to give the equal chance both to the young artists (but to those who are talented and accomplished artists) and to the artists who have confirmed their artistic value and become well known in this field.

—————————————————————-
My “review”
What really makes a strong impression in artistic creation of Steve Lareau is his utter honesty, openness and a very explicit demonstration of technique which the painter uses. Lareau uses new techniques in his creative work.

He predominantly uses the techniques connected to computers and does not hide that fact. Thanks to this fact, I have recently participated in a number of disputes with artists and art critics who do not support such attitude towards art. Their argument is “ a computer is a computer and art is something completely different ”

I personally think that the above mentioned is not deniable, but if we keep this attitude, brushes, pencils, paper, paints and canvasses are also trivial material things, aren’t they? To an excellent artist, every “trivial thing” can be a perfect instrument for realization of creative ideas, whatever we are talking about- a computer, a brush, paints, paper, canvasses….

The scope of interests of this artist is very wide, starting from almost strictly defined shape of an ornament to abstractions in the widest sense of the word.

Of course, the ornament is also painted in an abstract manner. Therefore, I would say that Steve Lareau is an artist who reactualizes abstractions in postmodern art of painting very powerfully.

This statement is correct, but it should be added a specific touch of this artist, a kind of personal credo: in this case, we are talking about post-modern lyrical abstraction.

Furthermore, when we say that we are talking about an abstraction, i.e. lyrical abstraction, that does not mean that the work of this artist is devoid of shape and form in general. On the contrary, although from the lyrical haze, the shapes are powerfully present, but not on semantical plane.

I would even say that Lareau consciously avoids semantical plane leaving it to the spectator. Thus, everybody gets the right to interpret the work of art his way and to re-create it. This is, no wonder, very close to conceptualism of so called avant-garde art of 20th century.

This avant-garde level is often unnoticed by the spectator and critics because the artist focuses on the lyrical structure of his work. Avant-garde level is additionally hidden by the extraordinary emotional charge of the piece of art, lack of irony and any sarcasm or maliciousness (which were often noticeable marks of avantgarde).

It is clearly noticeable that Steve Lareau is an artist of post-modern orientation, which testifies about up-to-dateness of his work and about freshness which it brings into contemporary art of painting expression.

What is far more important, at least to me, is the fact that this artist is walking down a lonely road, the road which does not have signposts, for which you need great courage and powerful inspiration, which is confirmed by the strength of his work.

© Nikola Kitanovic, 2002

New digs!

If you notice things a tad goofy here, it’s not you for once, it’s me. I’ve moved my domain to yet another web host, and I’m fighting to get things working properly, so pardon the dust.

Prints are now available!

It took longer than I expected to reach this point, but I am offering some of my artwork as a print, on both fine art paper, as well as canvas. It’s all at the website I built just for print releases, at Unquiet Visions.

A better version of Discovery is now available.

I now own a computer that’s got enough horsepower to compress the video I did years ago. I was able to take the raw, original, uncompressed version of my video and compress it as an MP4 video file. The video is much clearer, the audio is much better quality, and I was able to scale it up a little in size. If you’ve never seen it before, it’s available right here. Discovery

How I do it

I’ve been asked over the years how I do the strange stuff I do in Bryce, so I’ve created a little gallery of images to give you an idea of how I do what I do. How I do it.

I’ve launched a new website!Unquiet Visions May 17, 2005

I’m in the process of taking my artwork to the next level; I’m going to be offering some of my prints for sale. I’ve had many people asking for prints over the years, but I didn’t have a computer setup that could handle rendering images of the size I need to do prints. I bought a pile of parts recently, and built a computer from the ground up, a computer with one purpose- to sit under my desk and grind away at large images, a dedicated rendering box. It’s on it’s own battery backup system, so in the event of a temporary power glitch, it won’t lose days, or weeks worth of work. Or so that’s my plan, you know how that goes. Going to the next level has been years in the making, and I’ve finally been able to pull things together and focus all my efforts into making prints. I’ve found a local printer in the back of one of the high end art galleries around here, and they do the Giclée prints for many famous artists. I met with them a couple of weeks ago to take the proverbial nickel tour of the shop, and I’m excited. I’m waiting for them to get some new glossy paper to see how well it holds details. Head over to Unquiet Visions. That will be the place to find out all the details as pieces are released.

Bryce 5.5 is available!
May 17, 2005

At long last, Bryce is out of beta, and I’m happy to say that Bryce 5.5 is now available, right here. I was able to participate in this beta as I’ve done in years past, and saw an insane amount of work done behind the scenes. I’m telling you, the folks at DAZ were working their tails off for this release. By the time we were done with the beta, no one was in the mood to see Bryce for a while. We saw that program inside and out, and then some. I can assure you, it was worth the time and effort, our beloved Bryce has had a wonderful rebirth. I can tell you, from my own tests, that if you render scenes high in volumetric textures, or high reflection and refraction, this is an upgrade you’ve been dreaming of. With some scenes, it’s FAST. When’s the last time you heard the word FAST used in the same sentence as Bryce? Depending on what was in the scenes, I personally saw some render times slashed in HALF. Yes, I said HALF. The official word is that it’s 30% faster on average now, which I’d say is a good, realistic number. If you use Poser characters, DAZ has just done something you’ll love. You can now import and pose characters via a link inside Bryce to DAZ Studio, where you can change characters, poses, clothing, props- and when you exit, it automatically pops up inside Bryce’s main window. It’s a slick setup for those that do a lot of Poser stuff. There’s been an addition of some new sky presets, some imported object presets from yours truly, and new materials and textures, which have been sorted into groups that make more sense than they did before. For those that like working in Open GL, you’ll love the update they’ve done with this release. Terrain editing now has new brush sizes. If you’ve been frustrated by insanely slow render speed, this is going to put a mighty big, silly looking grin on your face. Go take a look at what’s new with DAZ’s Bryce 5.5 and go place your order. There’s some wonderful magic with this release.

Yeah, I know, I know, another incarnation? What can I say, I get restless with website design. This is officially V13. Yes, lucky (?!?) 13. I’m livin’ dangerously.

I’m streamlining things once again, I’m going to use Wordpress as a content management system. That way I’ll be more likley to update this web site, plus it’ll be easier to find stuff around here. Stay tuned while I work the bugs out. And please, if you see something’s not right, or run across a dead link or something, let me know, mmkay?

So far so good integrating things, it’s almost done.