Serious Giggle, originally uploaded by Grazia Horwitz.

Just want to share these lovely glasses with you all. I found them on the Creator’s Pavillion sim and I just had to laugh out loud at the name of the shop “Serious Giggle“. Anyway, they are scripted (colours in Japanese… always a surprise which is which). They are all prim, really lovely details, and the design is just really very modern and well executed. Yay for glasses!

The hair I’m wearing it Luth, from Philotic Energy, the skin is Belleza’s Belle, and the suit is Stella, from Michami.

Skeleton Harness (More BareRose Awesomeness), originally uploaded by Grazia Horwitz.

Uhm, yeah, what is to say about this… another tribute to BareRose? Most definitely, because aside from lovely clothing, smashing costumes and incredible fantasy wear, BareRose also has a vast section to get your inner kink out. Whatever the kink may be. Skeleton Harness comes with 6 colours of liquid latex catsuits, and this harness on top. As usual the details are amazing. Other than the harness I’m wearing the Bella shoes from Fuel, Belleza‘s Bella skin, and MMS Velma hair.

Domani, originally uploaded by Grazia Horwitz.

Oh well, since it’s BareRose appreciation WEEK, I figured I would share another BareRose inspired photo with you. This is the beautiful Domani set, which can easily be a brides gown,but in the blood stained version it gets a sinister twist.

Other than Domani, I’m wearing Maitreya’s Harlow hair in white and Fleur’s Allure Femme Fatale 2 in the beautiful diaphanous China skin tone. This photo is taken at Oubliette.

BareRose Nocturne, originally uploaded by Grazia Horwitz.

The fabulous Winter Jefferson has issued a blog challenge that I can’t stay away from, because Bare Rose is my crack dealer for costumes, and meanwhile also for the more day to day wear. But really, what June Dion stands out with, are her amazing (fantasy) costumes.

I think my favourite are the Nocturnes. There are 3 of them, this being the most colourful. What’s not to love, the rich textures, the primwork, the plethora of accesories to make the picture complete, it’s all of outstanding quality, excellent value for money … I opted for hair from Orchid Dreams, but I might as well have used the hair that comes with the costume, since it’s just plain good and the skin is Chai (Buki).

Well, not all… but a lot. In a recent post on her blog, Iris Ophelia refers to the prices for content getting higher in SL and she refers to skins. “L$1000 used to be the upper limit of pricing for a single skin, now that’s a median point. More people are coming into the SL design community with more sophisticated training (sometimes) and price tags that match.”

Now that wouldn’t be such a bad development, if that meant the actual quality of said, more expensive, skins would be superior as well. Which, all too often, is just not the case and I doubt, more than once, the self proclaimed RL experience of the creators.

Before I proceed, let me state that the skin I’m using to illustrate this post is not subject to review, nor an exceptionally expensive skin. As a matter of fact, I don’t even know what it normally costs. this is a freebie of a brand I didn’t consider any skins from before, so I was curious to see what it would look like on me. And it does look cute!

So what is this about? Well, considering the increasing amounts of money people are spending on skins, I often cringe when I see the quality of a lot of them. Seams, mismatched textures, blotchy make ups, pixelated textures, holes in heads (!), misplaced body features, more seams, poorly drawn hands and feet and so forth and so forth. Sloppy details that in many cases can be avoided. Details that someone who really cares about their product and really knows what they are doing, will work on, and will work on again till it is flawless.

I’d like to show you some of the things I mentioned, so that at least when you shop for skins next time, you know what to look for, or rather, what you hope NOT to see in a skin or at least know what you are spending your L$ on. Iris is doing this blog series “30 things I want you to know”, well, I consider it something you really should know, just like adjusting prims, or ctrl-0 for zooming in. If you click the photos you’ll end up on my flickr stream where you can open the large sized photos and see the details better.

To the upper left, you see the seams were the neck and the front and back of the template meet on the shoulder. Other notorious places for seams are the hips, the ankles, the inner legs rather than the outer legs and the waist. Left center is an example of a hand that again shows seams on the fingers (front and back) but also a noticeable difference between the texture on the back of the hand and the fingers. How textures blend are important because it makes your avie look more natural, more real. In this example it’s not well blended. Bottom left, an ear. A very photoreal ear. To be honest, an ear that I think is so real that it looks weird on an otherwise hybrid skin. Photosourcing is more than just cutting and pasting. Creating a photoreal texture involves a lot of work in photoshop in order to give it depth and make it blend in.

To the right a detail that most of you will say “pffff.. Graz.. you’re so anal” Uhm, yes.. you are probably right. It’s about symmetry. You see a line from the middle of the nose, via the lip cleft going down over the torso and you’ll notice the collarbones being off center, shifted towards the left, and the right part being higher than the left part. Further down to the breasts you’ll notice that the bossom is shift off center to the right. And whereas asymmetry can make a face and/or body more interesting, if my vertebra would be crooked like this, I’d be in desperate need for a chiropractor.

PS: no post editing has been done on these photos other than cropping and making a collage. The windlight preset which I use is from Caliah Lyon, and I uncheck the atmospheric shaders in the preference menu. This is the setting that I do all skin photos in.

Louise, originally uploaded by Grazia Horwitz.

Just had to post this… I was fiddling with some photos, and I love how this one turned out.

Skin: Fleur DNB Shoujo 2 (Azalea)
Hair: MMS Velma, Charcoal

Blue, originally uploaded by Grazia Horwitz.

Laune Fauna released her new skins Double Shot at her new sim. She has made a build with an atrium from where you TP to skin galleries sorted per skin tone. I’m so glad to see that these new skins have a bit softer eyebrows. They were my main issue in the old Chai skins. If you’re not confident fiddling with the brows yourself, Launa now offers prefab eyebrows in a large variety of colours. Double shot sells at L$ 950 per skin, or rather per 4 skins, because a single includes freckled and non freckled skins, and a normal and a cleavage version.