Grid Expectations

Niki made some new skintones and makeups! You can find this group gift/preview by looking in the group notice archives.

More goodies at La Reina & Evie’s Closet

Okay, so I know the hunt started like, yesterday, but there have been a few more additions to the freebies/dollarbies that you ought to check out. My friend Vivi shared some skins with me that she’d worked on, and they’re lovely! You can grab them for 1L each at my shop, Mela’s (the first one is my fav <3):

Another reason why you should return to La Reina even if you’ve already been there? Evie’s Closet has arrived! When I found out, my reaction was literally “omgggggg”… because I love her clothes. I have literally spent hours in her shop in the past, contemplating what to dress Medieval Melanie in next. Her designs and textures are lovely.

Anyways, she’s joined in on the freebie madness at La Reina This sweet outfit is free and I might be wrong but I think it’s available only at her La Reina shop right now:

I also love the Devotion gown that I got about a week ago. It made me want to get a castle and a unicorn ^_^

I’d also picked up her Peacock dress. The other two dresses depicted in the following image, however, are group freebies! If you love your avi, you will join her update group

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I’m participating in the La Reina Valentine’s treasure hunt ^^

Okay, this is not such a great pic but I was too lazy to make a prettier one. :p

There’s a sim-wide Valentine’s Day treasure hunt happening right now at La Reina! All kinds of goodies stuffed in pink hearts that you can grab for either L$0 or L$1. Stores like Veschi, Fireflies, D!ff, Desmoiselles/Juicy Poses, Lounge, Celeste’s Angels, Davo’s Dancefloors, Digital Eyes… okay I can’t remember all of them -_- but there’s lots!

I’m also participating. Visit my shop, my heart is easy to find ^_^ In it you’ll find the skin that’s shown in the picture above. I’ve thrown in the eyebrows too (just go into Edit Appearance and hit the hair color slider to change them from black to whatever you want), as well as a set of three facelights configured to attach to your chin, nose, or mouth (y’know, options for working around your other face attachments).

Happy Valentine’s Day <3

It was bound to happen: following the release of Eloh Eliot’s .psd files for her Another skin lines, a number of people took her up on her offer to modify the skins and redistribute them as they saw fit.

This is an awesome development for a number of reasons. Consumers are now presented with yet even more skin choices in an already huge market, because people who might never have ventured into creating skins are now delving into it since Eloh’s done most of the difficult work involved in skin-making. Another group of people who have benefited are those who have always wanted the luxury of a customized skin (or even an entire line of skins) but haven’t been willing to pay someone else an astronomical amount of lindens to do it for them.

Of course, there was the inevitable bit of initial confusion and concern as our more entrepreneurially-minded residents began to release their modifications in-world at a price, which is why Eloh’s posted an informative clarification on her blog. If you’ve any interest in this matter and/or are planning on selling your own mods, then it’d behoove you to take a look at what she says: legalese/licensing: moar clarification and explanation

If you’re too lazy to click on that link and read up (seriously, just go read it, it’s not that long), then here are what I felt were the most important points:

1. Leave the original copyright and license notice with your redistributions. Honestly, there’s no excuse for this… if you’ve downloaded the .psd files, then you’ve seen the text file for this.

2. Get Eloh’s permission first before including her name in any promotional activities regarding your redistributions.

3. If you decide to ignore the stipulation to include the copyright/license, she will not go on a vengeful manhunt seeking your blood.

So yes, if you decide to sell your mods at a price that is considerably higher than what Eloh had been selling her skins for, that is well within your right (although you should probably prepare yourself for a few raised eyebrows and maybe even a negative blog posting or two, since pretty much everyone in the SL fashion community knows exactly how much of the work you didn’t do). But for crying out loud, don’t try to pass off the work as completely your own and leave out the copyright and license. You WILL be much maligned for it.

P.s. Eloh’s made a male skin .psd available.

P.p.s. The Another Fundraiser event is fast approaching! You still have a few hours left to get your submissions in.

P.p.p.s. Show off your mods on flickr! Post them at the Another Skin Mod Club group.

Morrigan Repine made an exciting post on Second Impressions a few days ago about how Eloh Eliot of Another Shop had made the .psd files for her latest skin available for download at no cost, and I finally had a chance to play with the files tonight.

I won’t go into too much detail other than to say that the level of quality is in keeping with everything else we’ve seen from Eloh thus far; the skin is beautiful.

I’m sure everyone’s either already downloaded the files and begun playing with them, or are planning to do so very soon, so I figured it would be fun to create a flickr group where everyone can post pictures of the results of their modifications. The group is open to anyone that has a flickr account, so fire up Photoshop, join the group, and show off what you’ve done.

Here is the URL: http://www.flickr.com/groups/anotherskinmodclub/

And now, here is my own very first, very amateur attempt :p

One of my favorite things about playing dress-up with Second Life fashion is finding ways to put my own personal flavor or stamp on the clothes I choose to dress my avi in. Great blogs such as MichaMi Style Blog and Closet Crisis, along with their readerships, are a testament to the fact that this holds for true for pretty much for anyone who is into SL fashion.

Even with the multitude of designers in SL cranking out their products in a variety of textures and colors, however, if you like keeping up with the latest in-world trends then it’s still pretty easy to run into another avatar who will be wearing the same hairstyle, same clothes, same shoes… hell, sometimes they’ll even be using the same AO stands as you.

What’s an avi to do? Well, one great way to really showcase your own individual sense of style in your outfits is to tinker with the modifiable pieces that are in your virtual closet. Hair, skins, system layer items, sculpty prim attachments… there are LOTS of ways to play with your look if you have modifiable versions of these items.

I recently blogged about how sweater dresses are a current season staple in RL (well, for you mainlanders at least :p I hail from Hawaii, the land of T-shirts, shorts and slippers), and Last Call has the excellent Starley II Mini Sweater Dress set available right now. With five colors thrown into the pack, it’s already a real bargain… but when you consider the fact that everything is also modifiable, that just makes it even better. With a bit of imagination and time spent on editing prims and pushing clothes sliders, one can come up with all sorts of variations on this dress. (Important rule of thumb: Always, always, ALWAYS make a copy of an item before you begin editing it!!) Here are four different looks I came up with, all modeled on my soon-to-be-released Sturmer Harcourt body shape ^_^ (store credits and SLURLs are at the end of this post):

1) Modding Happy

This hip outfit layers the dress over a 3/4 sleeve black sweater and skinny jeans, cinches it with a velour heart-clasp belt, tops it with a smart looking cap and ponytail, and finishes it all off with pretty sculpty boots. To achieve this look, I made the following edits to the cream colored version of the dress:

• Shortened the jacket layer sleeves
• Shrank the sleeve prims, rotated them as necessary, and changed point of attachment to the upper arms
• Tinted the jacket and skirt layers grey
• Tinted the collar and sleeve prims a slightly darker grey to blend in with the system layers

The dress wasn’t the only item that was modifiable in this outfit, by the way! The right front bangs on the hairstyle (which came conjoined with the cap) were edited so as not to cover up the right eye; the black sweater had it’s sleeves slider maxed out; the jeans were shortened so as not to poke through the boots; the belt’s size was altered to fit the waist; even the lip color on the skin was modified. The only items that were not modifiable were the eyes, glove-layer manicure, and boots.

2) Long sweater layered over a skirt

Another chic fall look that layers the dress over denim again, only this time the denim appears in the form another mini skirt. The neutral tones of the sweater dress, tights, belt, and boots offset the dark blue of the skirt rather nicely.

The same simple edits that were applied to the previous example were made here as well, but without the color tinting. To accommodate the short length of the denim mini skirt, the sweater dress’s skirt layer was shortened a bit via the slider. With the introduction of a single new element and some fast easy edits, the sweater dress takes on a cool new look.

3) Bold contrasting colors

To change things up from the neutral colors I’d been playing with, I decided I wanted a look that was colorful and visually striking. I once read somewhere that the strongest possible contrasting color combination is black and yellow; I decided to use that contrast concept but tamed it a bit by pairing the already grey-tinted sweater dress in my inventory with yellow pieces. I wanted contrast, not walking bumble-bee, hehe.

Very few edits were required to accomplish this look, and most of it involved color tinting. The scarf (which was a real steal, by the way — 7 colors for only 50L) was originally white and I tinted it yellow. I did the same for the tights, which actually comes in two parts (on the underpants and socks layers). Because the color contrast was already quite visually engaging I felt that adding more accessories would make the look too busy, so I limited it to the chunky hoop-earrings, which are scripted to change color via voice command.

4) Basic black

For this final outfit, I went with the trusty all-black look. Again, this was extremely simple and required very little in the way of edits — all dress layers and prims were tinted a very dark grey (as opposed to completely black, which would have washed out all texture details), and the belt was modified to fit over the hips. The sweater dress takes on a look that is simultaneously cute, casual, and feminine when layered like this over black capri leggings, and worn with a dainty banded hairstyle and ribboned wedges.

So there you have it — four additional looks pulled out of an already great set from Last Call, all of them achieved with just some really simple color tinting and prim edits. Thanks to modifiable pieces, with a little bit of imagination and time spent on editing, you can show off yet even more of your own personal style.

Where to find these items:

Sweater dress set is from Last Call and body shape will be released soon at my store Mela’s

1) Modding Happy… Hair: Janine in copper from ETD; Skin: Celestial Studios Champagne Smoky Noir w/ freckles; Eyes: Simtropia greenish; Tres Blah plain black sweater on shirt layer; Boing Fromage black velour heart-clasp belt; LF (Launa Fauna) Ingenue jeans in indigo; Maitreya bloom boots in black.

2) Long sweater layered over a skirt… Hair: ETD Amber in copper; Skin: Minnu Model Fair SkinGloss(freckles) Teacher; Eyes: Simtropia greenish; Caroline’s Jewelry Lo Lo Painted Beads Bracelet, brown leather small; Last Call Yelena Torn Jean Miniskirt (pants layer and prim attachment, taken from the Yelena outfit); Last Call/vamp Liah boots, mahogany; Shiny Things brown strung leather belt; Paper Couture Plain Transparent Tights (underpants layer) from Barcola store freebie gift box; RaC Manicure 06.

3) Bold contrasting colors… Hair: ETD Lydia in chestnut; Skin: Nylon Outfitters Poppy Marked; Eyes: Simtropia brown deep; Imperial Elegance Woven Scarf - snow (tinted yellow); Blaze Pantyhose white (tinted yellow); Paper Couture overstated maryjane shoes, fedora; Celestial studios Lulu Chunky Hoops color change earrings; RaC manicure 11.

4) Basic black… Hair: Hiccup Slow Jamz 2007 in black; Skin: Insolence Lisa Tan Smokey; Eyes: Simtropia honey deep; Paper Couture basic hoop earrings (freebies from Barcola store); Fancy Schmancy slither belt; Girlie black leggings; Maitreya Sassy velvet Black wedges; RaC manicure 4.

My friend Vivienne Graves just directed me to an interesting posting on her blog, Second Impressions.

Apparently she and another friend happened across a store that engages in some rather questionable business practices. This particular shop sells hats, and some pretty cool-looking ones at that. Upon closer inspection of these hats, however, one makes some unexpected discoveries:

My friend Morrigan Repine alerted me to a shop owned by one Chigadee London, called ‘Couture Chapeau’, which seems to be…well, I don’t want to say ‘ripping off’, so let’s say ‘inspired by’ Megg Demina’s justly praised Chapeau Tres Mignon. Ms London has a variety of hats for sale here, some that are rather striking…but if you do what we did and inspect the objects on display, you’ll see that most of the striking detail work is not Ms London’s, but was sourced from full-perms items by other content creators. For instance, the feather detail on the ‘Faerie Feathers’ hat, priced at L$400, turns out, on closer inspection, to be the work of Mistress Midnight, from her ‘Lace Wings’.

Inspecting the prims of the other hats on display (you’ll have to be quick, as they’re all on a temp-rez cycle) reveals that the butterfly on the ‘Secret Garden’ hat is the work of Saajuk Bogomil; the feather on the ‘Petite Caponita’ hat is by Natalia Zelmanov; the tassels on the shoes on sale in the shop are by Siggy Romulus; part of the detail on the ‘Callas Chapeau’ is the work of Billie Sunchaser; and the rose on the ‘Black Rose Chapeau’ is by Logan Bauer.

~ Vivienne Graves on Second Impressions

After reading Vivienne’s post, I decided to take a look for myself to confirm what she’d written. The right-click > inspect function does not lie :p Here are a couple of screenshots I took that will back up what she’s stated (clicking them will take you to flickr where there are larger versions of these images):

I take a very similar stance to Vivienne when it comes to modifying items in SL. I feel that if you’ve paid for something and it comes with Modify permissions, then you are free to unlink, relink, and alter the hell out of that item if you so desire, even to the point of Frankenstein-ing it with other items… you paid for it, mod perms have been granted, and *it’s yours* to do with as you see fit.

What, however, about this turning around and reselling products that contain parts cannibalized from other content creators’ works? It is true that we see creative collaborations all the time in SL (i.e., talented animator and celebrated fashion designer get together and put out a new purse that comes with a purse-carrying AO; knowledgeable scripter and innovative builder create a revolutionary product that forever alters the manner in which people photograph themselves in SL). In these cases, arrangements between the parties involved were obviously made and agreed upon before the items were ever entered into the market.

Does the granting of mod perms on an item for sale automatically imply this kind of agreement? Can I take that hairstyle in my inventory with the mod perms, unlink it to my heart’s content (pun not intended there), re-link selected prims from that hairstyle with other prims I’ve either collected from yet other hairstyles or created on my own, and then turn around and sell my newly modified project? By granting me mod permissions on that hairstyle, did the original hairstyle’s designer grant me permission to take individual prims out of her work to place in another object for resale?

I honestly believe that common sense would answer to this is a resounding, emphatic “NO”.