Day 24

Me?… A Fashion Designer?…

That is what the woman has been thinking. She thinks that it will be best if environmental building is left to the main avatar and that I concentrate entirely on wearables.

She and the main avatar did actually give this a bit of a try a year or so ago, but nothing much came out of it at the time. They were novices in SL and the clothes that they designed reflected that: They were RL clothes really. Since then the woman has realized that what gets created in SL should be for SL; to borrow from Bett, should be NPIRL. Should be playful, humorous, otherworldly. Laynie Link’s hair pieces have also greatly inspired her. So, now she thinks that this time around, with me, maybe she can design clothes and especially attachments that will actually work within the context of SL.

…

Truth be told, I am a little disappointed. I was looking forward to building that installation that she is still thinking of doing and that now I suppose the main avatar will be undertaking when she comes back. But the woman says that, that project will need terraforming and lots of prims, not to mention that she thinks it will really work much better underwater. So, she says it will need to be done on the island.

But, she reassures me that the clothes that we will be designing together will be no less wonderful. She is thinking of doing one that will be like a walking underwater environment. And one that will look a bit like a powerplant… Really wild things…

I hope it will be OK. I am a little nervous to be honest… What if I am not wild enough? I wish the main avatar was building the wild clothes and I was building beautiful underwater environments…
:-\

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Day 10

Now that that whole nonsensical business of me not being associated with the main avatar has been cleared out of the way, the woman behind the keyboard has been having a few new thoughts on this matter. Which is a sensible thing in itself: It would have been just about impossible to come up with an artistic style for me. That type of stuff really doesn’t work like that at all.

About 10 years ago she had an extraordinarily productive winter and created a series of paintings in photoshop. They were all entirely digital, nothing was scanned. They were a fluke, a one off. She had never done anything like that before and she never did after that – until she started building for real in Second Life that is.

These were exhibited in RL, as very large printouts around that time. And then were promptly forgotten all about. What followed this series turned out to be some more of the vapid, albeit technically and visually quite accomplished, stuff that she had usually churned out for all of her life.

These are not really like the main avatar’s output. That is far more playful and humorous than this stuff, which is on the gloomy side. But there is still a red thread there. The other day the woman was visiting her mother who has one of these paintings hanging in her home. As she was sitting across from it, sipping her tea, she suddenly saw that red thread, which she really had not been aware of before.

…

So, she is now thinking whether it might not be an idea to recreate these paintings three dimensionally? Or maybe not these exact same paintings but something along these lines? She assembled these paintings out of photoshop layers that she painted. All the faces are made out of one face, by means of distorting the prototype. All those files are hopefully still sitting around somewhere, written onto CD’s – she hasn’t yet had the nerve to look for them…
If they are lost somehow, there goes this little idea, I’m afraid.

She has no idea how or why she made these. Her aunt, whom she was very attached to, had died earlier in the year and she was still a bit grief stricken? Like I said, they were a one off. Forgotten about until the other day.

…

Day 2

Building will be a quite a bit of a challenge, I think. The whole idea here is that I set up an artistic career in SL entirely through my own merit. No one must associate me with the main avatar in any way.

And she has a very pronounced style. She builds these darkly playful environments, that are based upon a kind of narrative. Not stories or illustrations of stories. Just that she places what she builds into a situation where there is a past, a story. And maybe even a future. Not that the result looks terribly welcoming. If anything it is a bit scary, her stuff. Nothing cute about it whatsoever. The colors are dark. lots of grays, lots of black. Lots of reflective surfaces. I do not think that there is a speck of highly saturated color to be found anywhere on that island. No flowers, nothing like that. She also uses a lot of daunting textures, like amphibian stuff and dead tree branches and bones. But anyway, one way or another, her stuff looks like as if she made it. And her place is sort of famous. Gets visitors, gets written up in all kinds of blogs. She has become part of the SL meritocracy. Maybe not a hugely big player, but firmly in there no less…

So, I really need to develop my own style. Now, one good thing is that she didn’t always use to do this sort of stuff. There has been a profound change in her output over the past year or so. And what’s more, the woman behind the keyboard is actually a graphic designer who knows how to work to a brief. She has done it for decades, for all kinds of different clients and projects that have had different needs that called for different solutions. Which, in this case, turns out to be a very good thing indeed.

I think I will go the way of Swiss Style. I will retain the dark colors. That much is ingrained in the woman herself. She has always liked to work with a darkish palette. However, she also knows how to bring color into the mix:

So, I think that she will have me go in this direction. For now that is how it seems anyway. Of course a lot can change once I begin…

;-)

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