Time to travel to lofty realms of Imagination…

If you’ve been reading Byteful Travel for a while, you’ll know that I occasionally (read: very rarely) release desktop wallpapers on the gallery. And if you haven’t been aware that there are dozens of free desktop wallpapers in the gallery, consider this your formal invitation to check them out!

And although it may not be immediately obvious, these desktops are usually travel-related. Instead of taking you to Earthly places through travel photography, the digitally rendered and painted wallpapers are meant to transport you to a place you may have only seen in your dreams. Most of my work in the Fullscreen and Widescreen wallpaper galleries is meant to evoke a feeling.

So today, I have three visual morsels for your eyes, and they’re some of the most joyous wallpapers I’ve ever created.

What do you get when you add a mosaic and a silk ocean?

Late last month, I started playing around with mashing up two wallpapers again. I’d already done this in the past with the Snowy Peak mashup (and I can’t believe it’s been almost 3 years since I created it), and this time I was working on combining Sol over Silk Ocean and Digital Mosaic.

Not as easy as it looks.
But, as I said before, the result are some of the most joyous wallpapers I’ve ever created.

Tinker to Find Solutions

If you’ve never played around in Photoshop before, you’re really missing out. The way you can manipulate and combine imagery is actually really incredible, and once you’re comfortable with the program, using it feels more like play than work.

After a lot of experimentation, I decided it was best to combine just the mosaic pattern and not include the numbers from Digital Mosaic. (The numbers made it too cluttered.) After a few sessions of experimentation (in which I existed in a flow state), I finally got the composition and blast of color I was looking for. (If you’re curious, it involved a Color blend and a Linear Light blend.)

Time and time again, working in Photoshop shows me that tinkering is a fantastic way to solve problems. If I never tried something without knowing the outcome in advance, I wouldn’t learn much. By taking some risks, I stumbled upon solutions I never would have thought of. And that’s ironic because this parallels life as well, doesn’t it?

I Could Tell, but I’ll Show

Risks certainly paid off here; and I could go into sublimely mind-numbing detail on the process I followed such as how I spent time making certain squares in the mosaic element darker and certain squares lighter (because I guess I’m pretty eccentric/obsessive about visual projects by now), but I’ll skip over that so I don’t inflame your ADHD even more than, I’m sure, it already is.

So, time to show and not tell.
I present: Cherry Mango Sunrise.

And if you’re an anti-mosaic-ite and would prefer the sky without any squares, I’ve created a version without squares (as well as a rockin’ cool blue version), and put them in the gallery. As I said above, this is one of the most joyous wallpapers I’ve ever created, and although it doesn’t represent a specific place you can visit (like my travel photography, for instance), I hope it can bring you to a specific feeling.

As always, the desktops are available in widescreen or fullscreen sizes, in resolutions up to an astoundingly ginormous 2560×1600 for widescreen and 1600×1200 for fullscreen.

To me, this wallpaper symbolizes Joy and Hope for the future.

When you look at Cherry Mango sunrise, what do you see?