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.

Winter has begun for the Northern Hemisphere of Earth which means it’s time to release yet another new version of the Snowy Sight desktop wallpaper. Incredible to think that it’s been five years to the day since the original Snowy Sight wallpaper was released in 2003. Today, Snowy Sight 2009, the fifth wave in the ongoing Snowy Sight wallpaper series, is released in 4 funky flavors: the standard Blue Aglow and Blue Deep versions as well as two new variations.

Probably the first thing you’ll notice about this year’s version is the new color. For the first time I’ve created two Indigo variations: Indigo Aglow and Indigo Deep. I stumbled upon this color scheme while experimenting with different hue and saturation adjustments in Photoshop, and now I prefer the Indigo versions above anything that has come before them. Who knows, perhaps next year I’ll take the next step down the color spectrum and create a violet version. (If you’d like a violet version, please let me know in the comments. I’ve been known to respond to demand.)

The second major modification I’ve made is the addition of the illusion of motion by blurring the six snow flakes in the foreground. This subtle effect took much trial and error to achieve in a pleasing way, but the result was worth it. And this brings me to something I learned this time around…

Tedium is Sometimes Necessary

Creating this year’s wallpaper took hours of perfecting and was a good lesson in how to be patient when confronted with tedium and false-endings. A false ending is when you think you’re done with a task only to realize that there’s a minor problem that will bother you ad infinitum until you fix it. For instance, first the motion blur wasn’t blurred enough, then the color wasn’t quite right, then the snow flakes’ positions weren’t pleasing… you get the idea.

Sometimes a certain level of tedium is required to produce something worthwhile—in fact I’d say there’s a level of tedium in every worthwhile task. In many aspects of life, this tedium can be reduced or even eliminated, but in artistic creation, the tedium of experimenting with variations, such as in hue and placement, is necessary in discovering something new. What separates a good artist from a great artist is the ability to have persistence in the face of tedium.

I hope Snowy Sight 2009, available in widescreen sizes, helps get you into a holiday spirit and ring in the new year. Until next time, Merry Christmas, Happy Christmahanaquanza, and have a wonderful Festivus.