Friday, 12 March 2010

Born to be wild... and the beginnings of a new product line

Felicitations on this fine antemeridian of a Friday...

I'm going to come clean and let slip some details of the new development I've been so cagey about now that the time has come for me to start publicising.

Back in January, my good friend, and sometimes accomplice Faery Sola approached me with an intriguing offer - a stamp rally, involving a number of stores that do a really nice collection of out of the ordinary clothes, gowns, accessories, poses, skins and all the rest of the sort of thing to need to function in-world as an avatar who doesn't sit in the middle of the road. Anyway. As it happened this coincided with a long thought out plan I had (initially thought of it in October 2009) to give the brand a boot and hopefully draw in new people. How? Basically I look at my textures and realise they were OK in 2007/2008, but things have moved on drastically.

Why has it taken me five months? Well... I tell people this repeatedly, but they simply don't believe me... When it comes to 2D digital artwork, I suck. What I know about Photoshop is writable with a wedge-tipped sharpie on the back of a postage stamp; so there's been a bit of a learning curve at my end... including a month set aside to create JUST THE ALPHA MASKS...as I had to do it by hand... well.

If you look at the pic that follows, you'll see something rather unusual for SL (hey... this is me... what do you expect?) Rather than go for the conventional "dodge shine" in horizontal stripes across the base prims, I've decided to pick out the highlights in the hair to give some depth and variety... basically it shines verticaly rather that horizontally (and on a more technical note, my alphas are at the top of the textures rather than the bottoms... ;) Its been a ride, but they're working for me... even if it took nearly a month, over 200 uploads and a lot of swearing, crying and teethgnashing just to get a workable alpha(!)

The new textures themselves are only, for now, available in limited colors - 8 in fact; but of the shades I sell instore, there's no denying they're the eight most popular so I hope not to disappoint too many of you.

So... what are we looking at? For Faery's event, I'm unleashing Katherine as a prize... score enough stamps and you can claim all eight colors for free.


When the event kicks off on the 20th, there'll be two more new styles under the new dDx banner to choose from... a messy low slung bun, tentatively called Heather, and a simple ponytail which has yet to name itself. In short, look out for some new stuff next weekend!

Until next time,

Kalli

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