I'll drop by your page anytime I want to relax and look at a lake in the mountains. :-) Great paintings!

The effect is called lens Vignetting.  You can do it in a multiple ways.  1. You can add it with a layer in photoshop and brush it out.  2. If you shoot in RAW in CS3 it has an option to add it.  or 3. You can get a filter for you camera to add it.  

I hope that helps ;)

yes, we did make stencils to spray with...thanks for your comments

Thanks for the comments on my pic. I added a little background about it on its page.

hi. Rockingham is (http://www.rockingham-tourism.com/intro.html)   is about 50kms south of Perth. Its a beutiful spot, a little cool at the moment, but an awesome sleepy (at least for me) seaside village (population 86,000).

Where abouts are you in brissy?

your work is gorgeous. of course i don't mind comments! i'm not ready to have my work available to everyone for free, but i would be happy to email you a file to use, if you'd like.

the garden piece i did:
was done in photoshop using illustrator elements. most of my pieces  are done using both illustrator and photoshop, constructing it in photoshop. the tree was a series of layers that i rasterized and did some overlay options. the dabs is just from erasing parts of the tree. i used a piece of cardboard image to get most of my texture.
hope that helps.

Australia, one of my dream vacation spots. Can't wait to see some stuff from down under.

Yeah, I use coffee, as in coffee.  A lot of underdeveloped countries use common stuff for drawing and image making.  Coffee and Red Wine are a great combination with charcoal, conte, graphite, pen & ink...  You should try it.  The wine makes a beautiful watery-pink stain and the coffee creates a nice brown or sepia tone.  Then you can work back into it with other medium.  I saw a show from Cuba once where all the guys work was wine on canvas.

Thanks, yeah, I draw from photographs.  I  prefer to draw with models, but my wife and other people aren't that patient with me. :)  I typically grid an 8x10 photo into 1/4 in squares and then I grid my paper to about 2in squares and then I go to town.  
Right now I'm trying to work much larger and looser with charcoal & coffee and a brush on large paper (5 ft. x 10 ft) etc.  Thanks for the encouragement.  
I like your painting of the bottle with tears.  It might be cool to do a whole bunch of those.  Each bottle being different from the next with a specific event in mind where your tears were shed.  I think seeing all those lined up with frames on a wall with the date of each event would be really engaging and powerful.  Just a thought.