Note: Five new flavors of this wallpaper were released 2 years after this article was written. If you’re interested in Wintery Holiday wallpapers, I highly suggest you check out this article.

Before I ever created a gallery to make my wallpapers available for free online, I created them for myself. It was only after experimenting with an iTools account (a now defunct service that provided high-quality web hosting for free) that I realized the potential to share what I had created — to share my solutions to the problem of an uninspirational, or worse, visually-stressful desktop wallpaper.

Restless Digital Artist

I had been using Snowy Sight 2009 Indigo for a while, and I got restless. To be honest, I got bored with it rather quickly, so once again I starting playing around with it in Photoshop. My original intention with was to create a binary-looking version of Snowy Sight — something that wasn’t afraid to show an aliased pixel edge or two. Simply pixelizing the flakes wasn’t enough, and I explored different filters and tools to try and create the desired effect. In my experimenting I noticed that the crystalize function produced an interesting ice-like effect, that worked well with the snow flakes.

A Cyan Plan

I also began experimenting with other hues for the wallpaper. Red felt too strong to use for a winter wallpaper, and I felt similarly about the other warm colors of the spectrum. However, a cyan hue had a certain appeal and hadn’t been done before. (For those of you who are unsure, cyan is the color between green and blue on the color spectrum.) When I shifted the hue to cyan, the way the gradient gets lighter to the top reminded me of the early morning sun hitting the snow flakes and causing them to melt. Bingo.

I call this new wallpaper collection Snowy Crystal. The wallpaper comes in 4 variations, including deep (i.e. darker) flavors:

• Snowy Crystal Cyan Aglow
• Snowy Crystal Cyan Deep
• Snowy Crystal Indigo Aglow
• Snowy Crystal Indigo Deep

As always the desktops are available in widescreen, up to 2560×1600 pixels.

Use these new desktop wallpapers to remind you that the snow will indeed melt… eventually. On the other hand, if you are in a warm climate, use them to remind you that snow does indeed exist.

And you should try driving in it sometime.