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Starting with a black canvas, I repeatedly used only three preset gradients, applying Quick Warp every so often, and re-filling the background with black. I applied Depth of Field to give that ethereal look and feathered the edges of the outer ring to recede into the background.
I used just two gradients - Sunset for the 'stage' and 'curtains', and Bronze for the swirls. I applied a bit of surface texture and colour correction to the Sunset gradients, and scaled and distorted the discs.
This was done in Painter 5, and 98 percent of the effects are the present gradients. I did one dash with a preset pattern (water) then used the plugin floater liquid lens just once to distort things a bit. After that I added a bit more from the gradients...and a bit more...and a bit more....until the title of the work came to mind as I realized I was having so much fun that if I didn't stop soon, I'd have a real mess (maybe I already do).
Image created in Painter 5, rectangular and oval shapes filled with the two point gradient tool. I also used the opacity control on copied floaters. The century plants were created using the shape tools and pulled into curves then filled, grouped, floated and copied. To created dark shadow places on plants I used a new pallet tool Photo Value add Sat Subtract which I consider to be a type of gradient.
I wanted to try painting an image using a gradient as a clone source. I used purple neon spiral gradient preset, the hatched paper texture, and the smeary bristles brush set on clone source colour to paint the angel. For the background, I used a blue to black gradient source and oil and water cloning brushes.
