Posted by Xiamara

I am really not at all sure that people will be lining up to buy these: I have indeed gone for flowers – but nothing cute or girly about what I did. If anything scary, I would say. I had no fixed idea what I wanted to do and while I started out aiming for something like a Rousseau painting’s texture, I found that I very quickly deviated from that and something else started to happen. The skins look a little bit like the women of Felix Labisse and so that is what I ended up calling them.

It was a hugely challenging project for the woman, who as a designer, had basically never gone anywhere near a flower in her life until I started doing these. And even for me they were challenging – if for no other reason than that of technique. It took for ever to get these to look right and some bits still don’t do so. However, that is not my fault but the SL avatar’s geometry. I compromised and deleted a lot of things, especially around the neck area since no matter what you do, the way it works is that you simply cannot get the level of detail on the neck as you do on the face. There are pieces that I left, I simply did not have the heart to do away with all of them since from a distance the skin looks good. When you zoom in really close the torso tattoo and the face tattoo have different levels of detail. Unfortunately…

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There are 3 skins, one light colored which I have named Bonjour Monsieur Labisse; and two dark tones, the darkest is Bonnuit and the slightly lighter one is (predictably enough) Bonsoir. Each skin has two variations a PG one, where all the naughty bits are covered and a mature one where one tiny bit is revealed. And each skin has its own hair: A very bizarre all perms item, initially designed by Ronja Pera, which I recolored and also added glow to. Alpha started this glow hair thing with her seashells and I have to say that it worked here as well.

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Designing an outfit to go with these skins is probably what took up most of my time. Or rather, it seems that way, due to the sheer frustration and trial and error that I went through. After trying countless shoes and belts and skirts I finally decided to only add a flower train and a pair of very simple flat sandals and leave it at that. Oh and, no, unfortunately the sandals are not shown on any of these images. I forgot to put them on… ;-)

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Finally, Alpha and I are in agreement about one thing at last – which is that we will not be giving away this skin as a dollarbie. There really has been way more involved here than the mere slapping on of a few filter forge filters and tweaking some makeup colors. We will be consulting with Ms. Eliot on this one of course – whether we are in fact allowed to sell something based upon the “another skin” template, albeit very heavily added on to, as this here very obviously is, or whether this is strictly off limits. If the latter turns out to be the case we will be giving the outfit to a select group of our friends and associates and leave it that.

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Phew… I am absolutely knackered!

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