Month: October 2022

A Brief Snapshot

I am almost always taking pictures. Often when I’m out exploring/shopping, I see really photogenic backdrops, and have to get pictures…

… these images are all from a few hours, this morning, when I was doing some casual exploring/shopping…

… I find a lot of cool places, this way… when I’m in a shop, and it is on a sim, I always have a look outside, to see if they have done any interesting landscaping, or if there are any other nice shops around…

… some creators have very pretty builds around their stores, making the whole scene much richer, more enjoyable than just shopping…

… I love when I get great pictures as well as new clothes!…

… there is so much to see and do in SL, so many amazing places waiting to be discovered… often, literally, just around the next corner.

Traitors Wood

In the fullest spirit of joining them if you can’t beat them, I have finally succumbed to the call of the Halloween-themed destination…

… finding, to my delight, places like Traitors Wood, with it’s wonderfully lurid colours…

… and dramatic lighting…

… which makes for plenty of interesting photographic potential…

… and just plain fun…

… ghosties and all…

… my Halloween-resistance has been laid to rest (:

Nimbrethil

Flutterbye and I visited Nimbrethil, yesterday. It is, given what time of year it is, Halloween-themed… yes, I finally gave in and joined the herd!…

… I even dressed for the occasion…

… but Nimbrethil doesn’t push the season down your throat, there is plenty of gorgeous, photogenic-to-the-max scenery to explore…

… beneath an equally gorgeous astral canopy…

… the colours and windlight here are fabulous…

… there’s a castle and a graveyard, but we preferred to roam the beautiful purple and golden woods…

… which eventually give way to this very picturesque shore…

… with it’s mysterious, veiled Isles in the purple mist…

… this is a beautiful destination, and we highly recommend a visit, especially for photographers (:

Three New Exhibitions

So, as I mentioned in my last post, I spent today hanging my new work…

… there are eight works, called ‘Snake Bite Series’ in my home gallery…

… this work is nothing like my previous work, and, obviously, not everyone who liked my previous work will like them, but I love them!…

… there are another eight at my Soho gallery…

… ‘Snake Bite Series II’…

… and five at my Artemis gallery…

… ‘Snake Bite Series 3’. Each series is slightly different from the previous, as I tweaked the ‘prompts’, but still very much on the same, mutant ‘Snake Bite’ theme (:

Snake Bite

I recently started a series of images I am calling the ‘Golden Planet’ series. I have been posting them on my Flickr page. There has been ‘Golden Planet Princess’, and ‘Golden Planet Pilot’. Over the last few days, I created ‘Golden Planet Tourist’. I make these works using multiple images I create in wonderful Midjourney, then I take several of those images into gorgeous Photoshop, and stitch them together with a fair bit of masking, and some touchup painting and a bit of clone stamp magic. I’d almost finished ‘Tourist’, when I decided she’d look more ‘touristy’ with a Golden Planet souvenir brooch, so I went back to Midjourney and had a go at creating one, there, instead of in Photoshop. I was really surprised to get, from my first 4 variations, 3 perfect-looking ‘brooches’!… so I thought, ‘hey, why don’t I whip up some snake bites (lip piercings) for here, too?’… I’d gotten such a precise result for the brooch, I was feeling lucky, so, among a few other (sorry, my secret!’) words, I entered as prompts ‘snake bite, lip piercings’…

… imagine my astonishment when I got four images that looked like this! But astonishment quickly turned to delight! Though nothing like what I’d intended, I found these results incredibly beautiful, if not slightly creepy, but creepy gorgeous! I could never have deliberately made work like this, this was a serendipitous AI artistic bonanza. One of the reasons I enjoy Midjourney is that my work has always been iterative, and the Midjourney process is pretty much entirely iterative… I banged out dozens and dozens of variations on this gorgeous theme, occasionally tweaking the prompts, but not much. I now have several exhibitions worth of this work, which I will begin putting in my galleries, probably tomorrow (:

The Gorgeous Woods

We visited ‘Four Bridges Homestead‘, yesterday…

… this sim is covered in absolutely gorgeous, autumnal forest. We kept seeing what we thought were sun dogs through the canopy, but we later realised there is an aurora effect in the sky…

… but it was the spectacular, autumn forestscape that mostly held our attention…

… there were places where the leaves were whirling around so actively that Flutter had trouble flying, and I had trouble seeing…

… but even those places were beautiful…

… in a growing swamp of Halloween destinations, this place is an oasis of photogenic magnificence…

… a balm for the soul…

… at this stage, we still hadn’t realised what the ‘sun dogs’ actually were, but we liked them, they were like rainbow bokeh…

… the richness of the autumn foliage, here, is just stunning…

… we felt we were in a Maxfield Parish painting…

… as my human is a cancer survivor, we always support the cancer-fighting causes in SL, but this is the first time I’ve actually bought a T-shirt… I wear it proudly!…

… it wasn’t till evening set in, coinciding with us reaching a high place, that we saw the full aurora (:

Placebo Gallery in Venezia/Venice

Flutter and I were both quite excited to be meeting Mikk and Pacific, this morning, to discuss renting a space for our new gallery in ‘Venezia/Venice‘. It went really well, Mikk and Pacific are lovely people, and on a mission to promote art and culture in their pretty sim…

… and now Flutter and I are part of that mission…

… we spent much of today, puttering around, setting up the space, which is very light and airy, and has three floors…

… I chose 10 works from my current exhibitions in my other spaces, plus two I haven’t yet shown in SL, only posted on my Flickr account…

… Flutter was her usual, sweet self, flying around me, singing in her little voice, and occasionally giving me ‘butterfly’ kisses…

… if you know me, you’ll know this is merely the initial setup for this gallery…

… I will fiddle with it for weeks, and be fine-tuning it for as long as I have it (: