Day 74: Black and White Dress

Today's soft-focus images seem to have blurred out most of the details of the eyes and skin that I wore for this shoot; however, the focus has cleaned up the jaggy edges created by cutting away the background, so it's somewhat of a compromise.


I can't remember if I mentioned this previously, so I'm going to go ahead and mention it anyway - I'm using shades of off-white in all my work now, both to reduce the starkness of a pure white, and in preparation for requiring a surface to do highlights and shadows on when I get around to learning to create wrinkles in fabric. I'm also using off-white as my background in images, which makes it easier to see the clothing.

This dress was inspired by a design I saw in a sewing magazine. I included plenty of panels to smooth out the pleated look of the skirt somewhat, and used plenty of flare to give a nice sense of flow, though it looks even less like the original that way.

Today's skin and eyes are by Robin Sojourner; I don't recall the names, exactly, but if you search for Robin by name, she has her stores listed in her picks. Today's hair is the ETD/Aveda Flip, a Black Pack, I seem to remember.

This last shot shows me walking with the dress on; I wasn't quite sure whether to attempt to match up stripes on my skirt with my pants, whether to leave the pants all white, or to use some combination. In the end I left it as you see it: off-white pants, with black stockings from above the knee. It still looks odd, to my mind, but better than it looked in the other combinations.

I'd love to know what my avatar was thinking when I took this shot. She has a real brood on :)

Day 56: Pink Petticoat

Time to completion: 1.5 hrs

Well, I was feeling a bit slack today, not really wanting to go out, so I thought I'd sit around at home for a bit, wash my hair, paint my nails, have a massage, that sort of thing. I wanted to stick on my dressing gown that I made a million years ago, but it looks like Sladen has it - it was just too much trouble to login as him/her, given the trouble my machine was having today.

At any rate, I've been keen to expand my experience with different fabric types, particularly since I'm a bit crap in that department - nothing like a bit of practice!! I pulled the lace from a photo, tiled the result by hand (because Make Seamless really messes up patterns), then erased the netting between the main parts of the lace to give a clean, open look.




I haven't focused in on the straps too much - they are a little wiggly over the shoulders, but It's my first attempt at making the straps so wee. Still, I think the triangular shape I've used might look better than a string strap at the shoulder; admittedly, it's not as appropriate for as many garments.

I paid no attention this time to matching the pattern at the seams where the lace is, though I think that I will investigate that soon. Or perhaps next. I may well get diverted by double layer skirts, or wrinkles, or clothing detailing like pockets and collars :)

I'm amazed that I've kept up creating, making up and blogging even for this long. It's pretty common for me to get frustrated early on in projects, feel bored and give up well before I could expect to see any results. I guess this is a good process in that I'm having substantial successes already.























Here's a brief update on my home turf. I've moved the photo booth out of the way to prepare a space for the waterfall and rock pile. I've laid out all my junk down on one platform, and set up the other with art of the walls and armchairs below that. Diana the Huntress protects all :)

Day 52: Boucle and Gecko.

Time to completion: approximately 3hrs.


Today's outfit features a texture I made myself - a sort of super boucle that you would never see in real life, the nubby parts being too overemphasized - a belt, a new neckline, and cut sleeves.

I created the boucle in the Gimp, basically just playing around, seeing what I could create starting from a flat color. I applied various noise filters, a couple of layers of layers of different colors and then bumpmapped the whole lot.







The belt is a simple resized torus - I learned to minimise the Y aspect of the hole size to make a thin torus. From there, it was just a matter of fiddling and judging by eye to get the thing to fit in a belt like manner. To get the color of the torus to match the pants, I followed a tip of Natalia's that works brilliantly - texture the item as per usual, then tint the item gray, (R - 192,B - 192,G - 192). You can see how well this works! The belt buckle is just a hollowed prism textured gold, which does not show up well here. I wanted to put in the middle part of the buckle and holes for it to go through, but I don't have enough skill with smaller prims - I keep losing them, even inside my specially created "prim theatre", against which backdrop they should show up.

There's not too much going on with the shirt; I used the path feature to cut the neckline and the sleeves, which gives a much better look than just leaving it up to the appearance sliders. The textures for the shirt were source from deviant-art.com.

Here's a second shirt that I was tinkering with today - playing with getting the armholes right. I uploaded quite a number of textures with the upper body template in the background, and tried a number of different cutting techniques before coming up with this. It really looks better in the Appearance posture than it does just standing normally. By this stage I was getting much better at matching the front to the back :)

Something I attempted today but which turned out very poorly was wrinkles in clothing. Understandable, I guess, it is supposed to be quite difficult, but I was taken aback by how difficult it was. I tried out several techniques, all of which were undeniable failures :) I moved on to try and follow a couple of tutorials, but was stymied, because the tutorials tended to be for Photoshop CS2, whereas I use the Gimp exclusively. Oh, well. Expect more experimentation to come!

The skin I'm wearing is I&K Leilani Nature Gloss Natural by LisaAnne Juniper at Inks & Kinks, Baeogae (157, 165, 75). The pearl drop necklace and earrings, a little hard to see in these photos but very nice, are by Second Mirage Fine Jewelry, proprietor Britneyj Crimson.

Day 51: Black Knit Skirt (High Waist)

This day I made up another of the outfits I drew yesterday in art class; a high waisted skirt, meaning that I would need to create a skirt in part on the skirt template and in part on the shirt template.

As far as technical details go, I will skim the details here, and cover things more fully in my technical blog.

Obviously there was the issue with the skirt crossing templates, which turned out to be quite easy, given the texture and color I chose - matching across this seam must be a nightmare, one which I sidestepped. Then I learned about making the waistband - not by following the contours on the template, as it happens. The next task was making the neck band; I first of all just wanted to make it a nice even shape, but then thought how much more polished it might look if I added a band at the neck.
You can see here that I managed to make the seams match up reasonably well :)









The buttons were ones that Tateru helped me make, as I had no idea how to construct them myself. Not quite what I had envisaged, but it gives me a good idea as to how to proceed next time.


The make up and perhaps even the skin are a little pale for this hair, but I was in a hurry to take the photos and run; as it is, it has already rolled into day 52 for me before I have finished this post! The skin is juicy by BettiePage Voyager. The shoes are paradise by X3D. The hair is mariah in seashell by Sirena Designs.

Day 50: Plywood Aniversary

I don't even know why; day 50 seems significant somehow. A nice round number, I guess :)

I spent a little time today in art class sketching out plans for things to make in Second Life, trying to imagine how I might accomplish things technically. Fortunately my skills for drawing have improved; once I'd have looked back over those sketches and wondered just what I was driving at.

I'm rather proud of this skirt - I created the texture myself in the Gimp, worked out the rotations and repeats required to make everything look right, and learned a bit about seams and matching. Additionally, this skirt has double the number of prims it started with to close the gaps that were opening up during walking - shift-drag the original skirt to create a duplicate, then press ctrl-z to move the two to the same place in space; next, press ctrl to rotate one set so that the two sets are interleaved.

I also tried a couple of skirt experiments, which resulted in failure, but which taught valuable lessons. I tried various methods to shorten the skirt created by ged's LoopRez Deluxe but to no avail - I must simply learn to make my own panel shape now, which is necessary in any case if I want to make skirts with fewer panels (and I do).



This is the shirt I refer to as the "Alien Nipples" shirt. Yes, I have a fairly retarded sense of humour. So sue me. The texture is another deviant-art special that obviously screamed,"I'm a nipple!!" to me. Of course, in my world, that sort of thing happens all the time :)






On a more sober note, I present this blue flower shirt; this garment had much to teach me about correct placement of texture over the template.









At long last, I've decided to return all Sladen's stuff to him/her and branch out on my own as regards a space in which to build, photograph, interview people, and so on and so forth through all the things I demand of a space. This time I've returned to my roots as a crap builder and therefore am not relying on a prefab house but on my own talents and creativity to create the foundations of a living and working area. (Oh, dear. Oh, dear. What am I thinking?) At any rate, here's some images of how the process has begun. The basic idea is to have an organic sort of backdrop, a level for all my dross, a level for inviting people to sit down on that also looks inviting, a little lit hutch for doing a bit of photography in, and lots of lovely empty space for building in. When I feel the need to be contained, I think I shall erect a quick temporary shelter. Or something. Hmm.


































Ok, so, what do we have here? The first stage of building, with walls, platforms and stairs. All textured and guff. The photo box. Bits and pieces of rock surrounding the photo box.
Come visit if you like :) Come check out the lack of wonder!!

Beginning either on Day 49 or Day 635

I'm now into my second Second Life. Day 635 (or thereabouts, I'm a little hazy on the specifics) for my first him/her, coming up on two years. Much of that time was not spent in SL due to health reasons.

Curvaceous, now: she's been around for 49 days, and I feel like my level of experience matches this more closely :)

I've made clothes before. Bad clothes. Clothes that should never see the light of day. I'm determined not to let that stop me any more, though. Natalia and her blog have inspired me to try and create once more and to persist in the face of failure. Of which there may be quite a large amount, given that I'm a complete beginner to this, and tend to overextend myself anyway :)

This is the first shirt I made today in my new clothing endeavor. I'm pretty proud of it :) Yes, I admit I had help - Tateru showed me how to do a couple of things in the Gimp (I had forgotten everything I had learned the first time around) and the texture is not my own, but from deviant-art, but other than that ...

This is a somewhat better shot of the shirt detail - it looks even better inworld. What surprised me was that I don't seem to have fallen afoul of the great stretching that tends to occur across the breasts - then again, that seems to be more of a problem towards the edges, and Curvaceous' breasts, despite her name, are not that big. Style Note: Hair: Sirena Pamela Dipped Blonde (by Natalia Zelmanov), Maitreya Jeans Hotpants and Bootilicious Boots (by Onyx LeShelle)

Now for a quick squizz at the terrible shirt I made thereafter. It's not the worst I've seen, but even at this distance, the clouds from the original image look more like ... blotches of mud, really. It looks like Curvaceous has been in the wars! We won't mention seams and mismatched texturing at the shoulders or anything like that ... nothing can save this shirt.

Let me also reflect upon the awful skirt I made during the week. Alright, it wasn't that bad, just ill-conceived, and obviously displaying my lack of knowledge in this department.
I wanted something that looked just like an RL skirt I have: a mostly straight wrap skirt, with pleating only on the front of the wrap. Things came together for me somewhat once I realised that skirt panels are not flat ... however, no matter how much I wrestled with the panels and their settings, they persisted in interacting with the mesh skirt underneath, even at rest, which just didn't look right. I might try a double skirt in prims next time, or rather, a base and an apron of panels.

In this image, I am also wearing Iris by ~silentsparrow~, gothic witch heels by Shizuna Jeffries, and Tipped Cyan Tart hair by Cake.





This image has nothing to do with what I'm wearing, and everything to do with my avatar's shape. I'm recording it here for posterity, to see how it might change over time. Right now she's at minimal height according to the height slider, so in fact a little shorter than myself, but with my long legs. I've tried to shape her like me, and I think I have the body right. We have a little belly, a rounded ass, and breasts just over 50. Her face - well, I do wear make-up like that some days :)

Here we are in a previous incarnation: with my beloved camera! If you want one of these, check out slexchange.com and search for Medium Format Camera (made by Smoke Mission, the properties tell me). I'd love to find a microphone to complete the set, so that I look all journalist-y when I go out interviewing and not-so-secret shopping.







For my last image today I present myself in my favorite outfit before the Iris: the ~J~ Stealth Techsuit, by Jynne Salome, Octatkna Boots by Ameshin Yossari, mofumofu hair by Seu Ahn.


Here is my profile entry as it reads today:

I like to chat, but be aware that sometimes I am working in SL, and may not have much time to meet a deadline. If you ask me, I'll let you know :)

Blogger, scripter, artist.
Fiction writer, non-fiction reader, roleplayer.
Dreamer, doer, procrastinator.
Compassionate, selfish, patient.
Flawed, persistent, real.
Frogs, insects, orchids :)

Likes: company, music, solitude.
Dislikes: lack of communication.

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As you can see, I'm a bit ... contrary sometimes. I hope that doesn't put you off too much :)