As I mentioned on the About Me page, one of my main free time enjoyments is any form of artistic creation. During my high school years, I chose an Art based GCSE as a final selection, not really thinking I would do well nor that I had much ability in the field.

As it seems to have turned out, both of my expectations were quite wrong. My ability can only be judged by the critique of others, so I would never be presumptuous enough to claim outright I was highly able. I found immense enjoyment in the entire 2 year course, ranging from pencil drawings, oil & acrylic painting even through to some physical modelling and printing.

This enjoyment continued past school and on to computer based graphics. My initial talent for creating websites came from a high drive to find and expand ways of producing artistic and graphic effects. Most of the original sites I did, then for Internet gaming are now offline, but the desire for artistic design continues on, with the recent move to learn 3D modelling.

Almost hand in hand with artistic creation, another hobby I enjoy a lot is writing. Again, during my school years I found a taste for creative writing. An ongoing project I have been working on for some time now is the "Lyter Side of Black", a science fiction based story with Lyter being the main character.

This story is based in the Planetarion universe, something else I spend some of my free time on. A large (ranging from 20,000 player to 180,000 players) online browser based game, Planetarion is a game based on strategic space combat with a very heavy dose of political intrigue created by in-game alliances.

Although I haven't played the game for quite some time now, I did some work on a volunteer basis as Head Admin of the Beta section of the game. It was my task to identify imbalances within the game, find out why said imbalance exists and correct it. In the games recent relaunch as Planetarion II, I lead the design team that created the games new races (4 races, each with 12 ships available) and corresponding ships. A lot of number crunching, a lot of late nights and an equal amount of constant tweaking, but to date 3 rounds on the ships are still in use, with the common belief within the community that they remain the best change in Planetarion in recent years.

Currently my limited spare time ranges from playing Squash to modelling work for BF1942, while looking for any window of opportunity to continue skinning/re-skinning anything I can. My ISU-152 project was my last big one, taking several weeks to complete even just the upper hull texture. My current project focus is alternating between a Mosquito fighter bomber and an HS129 aircraft, while I'm also looking to move into modern day vehicles for the game Battlefield 2.