Oooh, sparkly!

I learned a valuable (and expensive) lesson yesterday: shade clothing textures before you upload them. After realizing I wasn't getting the look I wanted for the few things I'd made, I went back to basics and learned to shade properly. I'm not completely new to shading, but my previous experience consisted of game sprites that were not only 2d, but a maximum of 100 pixels high. I expect I'll be doing a lot of practising for awhile yet. Anyway, I've been working on this ice skating dress for two days now. It's only semi-finished, still needs work and some better shading, but I like it so far.

The hair is from Sirena, but everything else was created by myself. Each and every one of those gemstones is a single prim, in three different colours to match the dress. They are lined up to fit the body curve, and extra shiny so they sparkle even when standing still. I spent literally hours getting those gems lined up properly - and it was worth it. I may sprinkle a few more of them at the top of the skirt if I can get it matched up right. I'm hoping to have this finished in the next few days, so keep an eye out for it!

Making money

After quite a bit of searching for some way to earn myself some money without digging into my pockets, I found it. Earn2Life! Far better than camping for low pay rates, in my opinion. Once you join Earn2Life, you get a combination of online and in-world offers to complete for L$. The online offers pay an average of L$ 40-50 (at least they do at my membership level), and most of them involve signing up for a site (using a spam email address) and then collecting the cash.

My favourite part, though, is the in-world offers. I get paid to go visit businesses and such, even if I decide not to buy anything. An example: I was paid L$ 7 to go to a clothing shop for 2 minutes. Once the 2 minutes were up, the money was paid straight into my E2L account. The only downside to this is that you have to have at least L$ 50 in your account before you can withdraw anything, but usually that amount is not difficult to get if you do an online offer or two.

E2L is a good deal for business owners, too - that's where the in-world offers come from. I'm pretty sure there's an advertising fee involved, but since I haven't got anything to advertise, I haven't investigated that side of it very closely. Anyway, it's a good way to get some guaranteed visitors to your shop (or whatever you may have) and increase traffic. If this sounds good to you, join up here:
http://www.earn2life.com/process/joinadvertiser.html?Britchik

[end spammy advertising post]

Vision in green?

When I was a kid, I loved to figure skate. I haven't been on an ice rink in about three years, so I decided to venture out to one in SL. I spent a couple minutes on the ice before deciding I needed a proper skating dress. Now I hate to spend money (even SL money) on things I know I won't use often enough to justify the price. So why don't I make one?

So here it is, my second clothing creation. A green halter top dress, with a flexi prim skirt (courtesy of a tutorial from Mermaid Dreams). There's a bottom piece as well, so the outfit can be worn without the basic skirt under the prims. The SKunkie Skates are a freebie pair from Skate and Date Ice Skating. I'm actually at a sandbox in these pictures, with a quick ice rink, or rather a small ice block, I made myself.

On another note, I've noticed that my clothes have fuzzy edges to them. I'll have to figure out a way to fix that. If anybody else using Gimp knows how to use the pen tool without fuzzy selections, please send a hint my way.

In the beginning...

So I'm what you would most likely call a newbie at Second Life. I've only just started SL in the last week, but within a day, I was hooked. Not only am I having a great time exploring, but I very quickly got bitten by the creativity bug - I was itching to start making my own stuff and share it (read: sell it and make some money). I started this blog to talk about things I've created, discovered, loved, hated, and pretty much anything else that relates to SL.

Within a day I starting trying to build things. Of course, I didn't have a clue what I was doing, so ended up visiting the Ivory Tower Library in the hopes of understanding what in the world a "prim" was. After a quick tour, I ran back to the sandbox to play around a bit, and came up with my first object: a wooden box. I know, anybody can make a box, but I was proud of it. I did at least try to make it somewhat original, with a slanted lid across the top.


The second object I made was another simple one: a gift bag. Not spectacular, not visually appealing, but it was a learning thing. This was right around the time I decided, "Hey, let's try some clothes and see what happens!"

This time I was semi-intelligent and looked for help before starting. I found Mermaid Diaries, which has some excellent tutorials (and loads of amazing stuff to buy in SL), and actually took the time to read some of them. The result? Not as good as I was hoping, but better than I was expecting.


Quite a bit of clean-up is needed on this shirt, but maybe if I can fix it up, it's something I can eventually sell. This is assuming I am able to open a shop, of course, something I'd like to do someday in the not too horribly distant future.

So not much exciting for my first post here, but hey, gotta start somewhere, right?