Kick The Darkness paints a vividly open, honest portrait of the man behind the art.  Those of us who are not artists tend to think that pictures just somehow come together.  Mr. Lareau shows us the evolution of the pictures, not just the finished product.  And you become acutely aware that there is a lot of trial and error and happenstance to bring an image to fruition.

Hilltop Design is a large site encompassing professional graphic design, personal pages, and Bryce works.  Steve Lareau is the Bryce Worldwide Users Group Host and the founder of Bryce Portals Around The World.  Launched on October 25, 1998, the portals offer a voyage, created by 22 artists from Great Britain, Austria, Canada and the United States who have built 'worlds' based on a single theme.  There are two broken links within the portals, but just click on 'Next 5 Sites' when you encounter one, and you'll be on your way again.

The Bryce Galleries are made up of twelve separate exhibits containing 349 images.  You will view the progression from first efforts with the software through to today.  Mr. Lareau's sense of humor comes through in the titles of some of his works - Recycled Bird, When Pasta Goes Berserk.  Have you ever seen a Blue Apple?  You will here.  Galleries 1 and 2 hold the first designs, while galleries 3 and 4 begin the experiments with shapes and landscapes.  Bloops 1 through 25 are a series of abstract art in gallery 8 and this is where Steve starts to add his comments as to how he achieved some of the effects in his pictures.  Can you imagine a bowl built entirely out of arms created in Poser?  Or a tree?  How about a vase created from the tail of a dinosaur?  Galleries 9 through 12 provide a look at some truly one-of-kind renderings.  Here's a contradiction in terms … semi solid, liquefied smoke.  That's how he describes one particular image.  Wonderful experiments with camera angles on the same image showing vastly differing results.  He has even taken a Hubble telescope photograph of a galaxy and used it as the basis for several images.

The Apple Project takes us on an amazing trip through the creative process of one image he was commissioned to provide for San Francisco Imaging.  See how he took the Apple logo and turned it into a Swarm of butterflies.  Unfortunately, the project came to an end before it was ever released to the public.  This is a story of how things get started and dropped in this whole internet/graphics/design thing - the countless hours spent creating, and then … nothing.  As you go through the images in this section, you will get a real sense of the artist at work.  You develop an image, fine-tune it, it doesn't work, you scrap the idea.  And for some unknown reason, you still keep going back to it because you believe somewhere, deep inside of you, this idea will work if you can just find that one elusive component to make it all come together.  If you ever thought you couldn't possibly create anything, this light-hearted look at the design process on The Apple Project should dispel any of your fears.

Bryce Fractals Worlds holds images set to fractal generated midi files created by Steve.  Fractals are created using mathematical formulas and are generally applied only to images.  He has taken the unusual step here of adapting those formulas to musical tones.  If you're using Netscape, you'll need to click on the title of the piece, in the top left corner of the frame, as the music starts automatically only in Explorer.  At the end of the tour, there is a link to a tutorial, published at DIGITAL PRODUCER MAGAZINE, on how to turn a fractal into a terrain with Bryce.

The Bryce Video, Discovery, is a 27 megabyte audio/visual wonder - well worth the time it took to download.  Accompanied by music composed by Shirley Kaiser, the scenes rendered in Bryce by Steve Lareau brought an overwhelming feeling of both joy and sadness at the same time.

And last, but not least, is a large resource section for the novice and the experienced Bryce user.  Included in this section is Bryce Beetle Shell Material, which contains a humorous account of Steve's attempts to duplicate the shell of some exotic insect that landed in his swimming pool one day.

Click on the Delicate Rings image at the top of the page to begin your journey into Mr. Lareau's Tennessee domain.

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