I've not made a new desktop in a while and since I found a picture that I really liked I thought it would be a shame not to use it in some kind of desktop. The trouble is that sometimes pictures themselves don't give you much inspiration on how to make them into something more artistic so every so often I'll buy a Photoshop magazine. I never follow the tutorials in them all the way through, since I usually go off and do my own thing but they're a good inspiration. The latest desktop that I have made was inspired by one of these tutorials although if you'd have seen the image that I used as inspiration and the finished product, you'd have a hard job recognising any similarity between the two.

Something I find when reading tutorials for graphics is that they tend to result in a rather feminine looking end product and they usually use a picture of a woman or girl. That's not helpful for me so I had to learn to adapt. Sometimes it may seem that all you'd need to do is swap pink for blue but it's not that simple as tutorials are actually written with a colour scheme in mind and sometimes you've got to change the blending modes because of it. It's why I learnt to use these tutorials as inspiration rather than following them and I hope it's made me a better artist.