I am experimenting with an animated background image.It is a paint brush pulling the sky paint across the pg. I just did part of it if I finish it it will come back below the other way. Right to left then below left to right guess I need to make the brush stroke wider so I can do fewer of them to get across the pg.
www.workhorsepainting.com The biggest problem is keeping the file size down
If you refresh the pg it runs its one shot anim again

Interesting effect!

Nice idea Greg, didn't seem to be slow to me at all, give it a shot and go for it all the way and let us know when it's done so we can see the full effect.

Greg B reporting for duty, Well I redid the anim, The file size is huge 7.4M. I do not know how to make the anim any smaller and get it to position properly on the pg as a background image. It looks and workd great as a preview running off of my hard drive confined to this computer. The 7.4M uploasd of the anim took forever with my 3G wifi connection. Seems like the contents of the pg loads pretty quick and then it just drags on the background image for me and burns up tons of broadband on my pay as you go broadband to go virgin provider account I burned up about 32 meg uploading it and watching it operate a couple of times. But all in all I still like it I like fancy graphics stuff
www.workhorsepainting.com
Let me know what you think about it on your faster working connections I am sure that on dial up it would never be seen they probably would assume that there was no background image then
Hopefully nowadays hardly anyone has dial up

I like the idea of 'painting the sky blue' kind of, but I agree that it is a monstrous file size. Have you tried making the part that is animated a bit smaller? Maybe that helps. Maybe also reduce the quality of the image. As a background image quality is not as important as the images of your work, so that wouldn't matter.

When I have a single image of the clouds up as a background image it is a jpeg image and it is 1920x2500 res at 523Kbytes. Anyway in order to have it render correctly being as it is not a repeatable image and center properly on the pg etc I have to use that size of an image to get proper rendering on my monitors and most others monitors too. So I have to make each frame of the animation at 1920x2500 res I believe that if I made the anim images smaller I would have offset rendering and UN-centered problems I would have to go to a solid color painting from white to flat light blue or something like that to be able to cut down on the pixel size of the anim frame images. Probably anyone with DSL or faster connection it will render just fine and below DSL will be rendering too slow probably
But it does look good on the preview

Greg - Seemed pretty choppy with my DSL connection.

Greg, What program did you use to create your animated gif?

That takes way too long to load but it is a cool concept.

Yeah I still love the whole idea, but it's definitely too slow to load now. Very choppy and when it gets to the end of the 2nd row it just stops and then all of it is finished at once, a bit clumsy I guess.