About Me
Francis Windram was born into a family in Harpenden, a small town in Hertfordshire. He has lived in that same town all of his life. He attended 2 local primary schools and St Georges V.A. School.
Ironically, Francis despised art when he was young, finding it hard to transfer his ideas onto paper or canvas. The paper would never bear any resemblance to the mental image he had in his mind and this became extremely frustrating. After a while he decided that art didn't seem to be the right path for him and stopped lessons as soon as permitted. He carried on with other interests he had such as science. Suddenly everything changed
Francis started to write short stories at 13 years old and started to discover his imaginative side, here was a medium where he could convert all the milling ideas in his mind into a tangible transferable form. For a few months, stories took over his life, and many nights were dedicated to typing word after word onto a laptop computer. One of the short stories can be found here: The Questioner
Soon after this, his family bought a compact digital camera. This was a turning point because now Francis had another medium to express himself. He instantly took to the camera and started experimenting with different shutter lengths and exposures as well as lighting effects and angles. This new angle on life brought up new problems. For instance: most 14 year olds do not have acess to £395 just to buy Adobe Photoshop to touch up a few photos, yet there were still photos that needed touching up. So he turned to open-source software and voila! Enter the Gimp.
The Gimp (an open-source photoshop alternative) was free, powerful and very flexible. It provided all the tools you could need for photo-editing whilst being small and quick. One of the filters included was called "Flame" and rendered flame fractals. This caught the eye of mathematically-minded Francis and he set to work creating works such as this:
After experimenting with Gimp tutorials, Francis decided to combine both Photograhy and Gimp techniques and discovered the whole new world of photomanipulation. The technique of combining photos and other media has been around for years, but in its digital form, it is a relatively new idea.
From that point, the variety of his work increased and increased, encompassing icon design, 3d terrain creation, abstract wallpapers, calendar & coaster design, vector work, resource generation and stock photography
