Making the Egg
What's here


This page has the art and steps I went through to make the Egg.


What is the Egg? It is the visual, virtual online chatroom of the Marshalites created by Stewart Breston. Stewart's Egg is far more complex, dimensional and visually appealing than I can possible hope to mimic but this gives an idea of what the Egg is like.


NOTICE: ALL images on this site are under copyright protection. These images cannot be legally used without the express written consent or paid permission of their owner.


PLEASE - be respectful of the hard work of others, just as you would wish them to be respectful of work you do. istockphoto.com is a VERY inexpensive way to get great art and photos for any projects you may be working on. ANYBODY can afford this service.

The Egg - The starting point:


This is the original art I started with in crafting the Egg.

Created by:

Purchased at:

Becoming half an Egg:


Using the stock image and an odd assortment of software not really designed for what I was doing (I'm not a graphics designer) I clipped out the part of the Egg I wanted (MS paint) then added transparency (MS Photo Editor) and saved as a png file.

The basic Egg:


With half an Egg(+), I now went to a little know graphics editing program called MS PowerPoint - that's right, I used PowerPoint (egad!).


I simply made a copy and flipped it then slid the two images together and... well, actually I don't remember the exact steps I used but I ended up with a complete Egg, selected it and saved it as an image file (again png).

Egg with light:


In Stewart's Egg, conversation (all media types) is denoted by streams of light. So I wanted my Egg to have something of this effect. This, however, was a bit beyond my skill so I ended up adding a standard lighting effect with the trial version of PaintShop (I found PaintShop to have lots of features but basically over my head as a non-graphics guy - I'm a writer, remember?).

The Egg with Icons:


Finally, I took the icons I had created for several of the Marshalites (see the Egg ICons link for more on them), imported the whole batch into PowerPoint (here I go again!) where I could easily resize and rotate the images then saved the whole thing and... wha la... the finished Egg!