If you are interested in obtaining a print, we are offering a wide array of options, from greeting cards to posters and canvas prints via RedBubble.

They can be ordered and downloaded from our shop here.

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Click here for a live demo of this template!

This year we had a choice between 4 different contenders for the cover. Which one would you have chosen?

Fitting right into the time around April 1st, here I am sharing a few tidbits of one of my current projects. Illustrations for an Oracle Deck that will be published by Hay House centered around the archetypical symbol of the fool. There will be 52 of them so that already has been and still will keep me a bit busy for a while. A nice thing is that I got to pull out my pencil and paper for that which has been neglected for quite some time as the computer has completely overtaken the creative process.

Images © Silas Toball - No reproduction without written permission.

Waterdome

Monsalvat

Isle of the Dead

Charon's Lullaby

Clicking of any of the images will get you to the gallery.

In the previous post I already mentioned that we were going to switch out the gallery component of this site. This is now done and to celebrate it I uploaded 4 new pieces of art to it. Especially the Isle of the Dead and Charon's Lullaby mean are special as I feel a deep connection to them. Charon, by the way, is the ferryman in Greek mythology who brings the souls over the river styx into the underworld. The Isle of the Dead is inspired by the famous painting of the same name by Arnold Böcklin who actually painted five versions of the same subject. Very captivating and moving is also Rachmaninov's symphonic tone poem of the same name. There is also another tone poem by Max Reger.

The mysteriousness of transitioning from one world into another is something that has been fascinating me since I can think back. I believe it will always play an important role in my work. The mystery, the unknown, but also assistance for those who embark on this journey. I also think that there are worlds within worlds - not just in terms of life on earth versus life beyond this one. I want to include the worlds of possibility and of the dream state. There are more, but those might be the ones whose concept we can grasp most easily. As many philosophers and spiritual teachers have noted before - there are more worlds than we can imagine and there are more dimensions in existence than those we know of because of having them witnessed with our physical senses. Where does a thought go when it was released as a possibility that we ended up not choosing? Very good material on this can be found in the original Seth books - e.g. Seth Speaks and The Nature of Personal Reality by Jane Roberts.

If you are interesting in getting any of the new images as a print, we do not offer prints ourselves at this time, but you can head over to our redbubble place and get one there.

• A new way of blogging and a new comment system: We are happy to report that we got rid of MyBlog which was vulnerable to a hacking attack and while switching to a new system we also introduced a new comment feature which finally allows us to respond to comments which was not possible previously.
• We consolidated the two blogs Angi in Wonderland and Message from the Muse into one. This should make it easier for all of you to keep up with The Muse and more frequent updadates on Message from the Muse will be expected.
• Some of you have reported the occasional error message "Invalid Token" when trying to sign in. This seems to be fixed now as well.
• The shop temporarily experienced a problem not showing the shipping method. This was an issue that was tracked down to a change introduced by the USPS. This is fixed now.

As always, it is a project in progress and our site will continue to grow and morph. One of the next things on my agenda is to re-vamp the Gallery and add some new art! So stay tuned!

As a special treat it also marks a sneak preview as this particular piece of artwork will be featured in our book about digital collaging that will be published next year. In it you will find a step-by-step insight on how it was made among lots of other new art and tutorials... But for now I'd recommend to hop over to the Agents of Mercy site on MySpace to check out some of the new sound samples. If you like creative, well-made and highly enjoyable rock with progressive touches then this might be for you!

Here is my other blog entry introducing Agents of Mercy's first album.

The symphony can be described as late/post romantic with a strong influence of impressionism. What that means in English are grand sweeping emotions - in fact I feel like drifting on the sea, going up and down with giant waves from one valley to the next peak and back. It is a grand celebration of nature and during the course of the movements it manages to lift your spirit like only few other works managed to have such an effect on me. When it is finally over it leaves you full, exhausted and utterly mesmerized in your chair. It is in my experience true music for the soul!
Yes, it is one of those pieces of music that dwell in grand epic pompousness in the best sense - those of you who know me know that this is of course exactly the thing I love so very much, hence my judgement may be perceived as a bit biased perhaps...  ;-)

Recently another live recording under the baton of Leon Botstein became available as well. You can find it on Amazon for example. This version turned out almost 15 minutes shorter than the previously mentioned version which was 73+ minutes long. A drastic difference where I find myself preferring the longer version over the shorter one as the end for example does not strike me as delicate and haunting in the shorter one, I have the feeling that it sounds somewhat rushed in comparison. I have also read that there seem to be plans for an official studio recording. I can't wait to get my hands on that… It is about time for this masterpiece to come back out of the shadows.

If you are interested to find more about this wonderful music and the composer there is an excellent web site about Joseph Marx that is worth visiting. It will give you plenty of background information.

 Yes, computers need love too. and new toys. and peace has to be maintained in the ethernet. So this is now in appreciation  of those who keep all the gears greased and oiled in order to make digital art music and what-not productions possible. Besides my creative work I have been maintaining our flock of (at times up to seven) computers at Duirwaigh Studios since 2003.

So, lately the clock struck again. Time to do maintenance. On my main graphic machine, a Mac Pro, I finally moved everything to Mac OSX 10.6 because this version is more streamlined and efficient. But withit came the need to re-format the boot drive. Basically installing everything from scratch and weeding out old programs that will no longer work in 10.6. Wonderful new start. Photoshop still loves to crash every once in a while, hey, what's new! Bug fix releases are a foreign concept to Abobe. Sigh.

The music machine needed help too. The big switch to 64bit was imminent for me as my goal is to run full orchestrations on a single machine. With 32 bit you can only use 4GB of whatever RAM you have (I have 14) and when you hit this 4GB roof, programs will crash. Might as well send the violins home, while practicing with the French horns. Not always what you want to to.

In addition I experimented with a new concept. The installation of the first SSD drive to replace the old fashioned boot-harddrive. Now that was probably the best hardware upgrade I ever did in a computer. I am sure over time I will do this on the graphic machine as well and - once the SSDs get cheaper - I will definitely want them to hold the main orchestral sample libraries. The gain in speed is tremendous. My music computer is now booting in just a few seconds. Imagine Photoshop using SSD to use as a scratch disk... It is really worth mentioning, because no computer upgrade never posed such a big step of an improvement. SSD for a boot drive, I think everyone should have that!