Magnetic Wave
Kevin Pietschman of Gurnee, Illinois
My inspiration came from pictures on NASA's Picture of the Day Archive: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html. Specifically, there were infrared pictures of types of supernova blast waves that occur in space. I have always been fascinated by astronomy, and I like to add something with a twist to it such as the piece I made.
The original picture I started with was a fairly simple picture of a starfield. The piece was entirely composed in PhotoShop with the use of the plug-ins. The chrome parts of the images came from Kai Power Tools 5, and the rest was done with various filters from Kia Power Tools 3 and Eye Candy 3.
The machine used for creation was a Gateway 2000 computer with a Pentium II 333-MHz processor with 256 Mbytes of RAM and running Windows '98. My dream goal would be to work with video special effects as seen in The Matrix, The Cell, X-Men, and Hollow Man. My dream machine is the SGI Onyx 3800.