This picture was a lot of fun. Accompanied by Mr. Ron Watt, my wife, Patricia, and I went to the Red Bluff offices of cardiologist Michael W. Stewart, M.D., whose receptionist found a life-sized model of a child's heart. Patricia and I each held one side of the heart while Ron took the natural-light picture on an old Nikon F.

A 5x7 print was scanned into Corel Photo-Paint 8, where the background was masked and erased. After edge smoothing at high magnification, an oval vignette filter was applied; next, Adlus Pagemaker art filters were shortcutted into Photo-Paint, and "Dry Brush" was used to get the oil-painting-like effect.

Then, the Corel type file was exported into a TIFF file, which was then loaded into Microsoft Image Editor in FrontPage 98, where a GIF image with transparent background was created. Whew! But a lot of fun and hopefully visually (but not cardiac) arresting.