Float to Me on Your Illusion

"Haunt me tonight,

Float to me on your illusion,

Show me a sign to let me know.

Haunt me tonight,

Let me see your silent vision,

It's all of your light I have to hold."

--"Haunt Me Tonight," written by Richard Marx & Bruce Gaitsch, from the album A Lyre in a Windstorm by Bruce Gaitsch, 1996.

This is the painting my website design is based on. Some artists use a pre-existing painting for their site design, but I did this one especially for my site. And it took beyond forever to finish because Everything. Had. To. Be. Perfect. Since this was going to be the first impression web visitors would get of my work, and since it would be seen repeatedly, I obsessed over ever detail, trying to get everything just right. I couldn't even count how many hours went into this--if you count all the failed directions and back-tracking, it was easily over 100 hours, and took four or five months on and off. I had to force myself to leave it because if I had carried on the way I had been, it would never actually be finished. I love this painting, but you have no idea how glad I am to be done with it.

The title comes from a line in the song quoted above, "Haunt Me Tonight." I'm a big Richard Marx fan, and though HMT actually appears on a Bruce Gaitsch album, I've always thought of it as a Richard Marx song, and it would be my favorite Richard Marx song at that. It's fitting I ended up choosing this as the title because when I started my website back in 1996 (back when it was called WhiteFantom's Haunt), a quote from the chorus above appeared directly under the title of the page, and it stayed there through three more years and two more site designs.

And please, for the love of everything good and holy, please look at the detail close-ups. The full version above is reduced to about 20% of the original image size and an unimaginable amount my my blood, sweat, tears, and loss of sleep has been lost in the reduction.

Date: December 2008
Tools: Corel Painter IX
Dimensions: 4800 x 7200 pixels (16" x 24" @ 300 dpi)