Long ago, when I got started on this bizarre skinning odyssey, I'd had the idea of creating not just skins, but groups of skins. With not much thought, you'll figure out that pazdziernika (fall) and glacial (winter) are intended to be part of a series.

But who knows when I'll get around to creating the companion pieces for spring and summer?My last burst of skins-related activity came in late April and early May of this year. I finished snow-comes first, then began working on two companion skins. When I created acquiescence, which had a photo of Edmund as its centerpiece, I intended it to be part of a two-piece set. The original idea would be to have a similarly-toned skin featuring a photo of Tenzing serving as the other half.

I designed the flat for trompe l'œil and finished it on Wednesday, April 30 - a day before posting acquiescence - but found myself more fascinated with the ideas incorporated in the skin than the actual skin itself. The subtle use of color to create the impression of raised buttons and lowered form fields can be traced directly back to this skin.

If you go by the dates of posting, trompe l'œil will appear to be derivative of a lot of the work I've done over the past six months, but the reverse is true. The ideas that I got from this skin quickly percolated through most of the pre-existing skins, at the expense of this one actually being posted.

So, as a sort of an answer to a question that probably no one knew was even being posed, here it is. You can see the full-sized screenshot here or you can wander over to the skins page to see the full stats on the skin.

As always, if there are any problems with your particular browser, please let me know. My testbed currently consists of a Win2K machine, covered in CD-Rs, settled bits of cat fur, many scribbled notes, IE 6.0, Opera 6.02, and Mozilla 1.2a. I suspect that IE for Macs will have an issue with this skin, but I hope I'm wrong; I suspect Mozilla for Macs will render it just fine.