Atmospheric Adventures

My neighbor told me the other day that she enjoyed seeing what I was going to put up next. I'm rather pleased to have an audience. I have a parcel in the mountains on which I've placed a plethora of towers and secret laboratories. The process is the enjoyable part for me. I like setting things up, decorating and retexturing them, getting just what I want. Then I get bored and put up something else. My new project has at least been photographed, and the information herein will help me find it again if nothing else.

A mountain retreat can indeed be a retreat. I'm going to spend some time here contemplating the verities and getting back in shape. Let's start the day with yoga, specifically the sun salutation. The sun is just coming up over the mountain.

Yes, in Second Life, I can do yoga in heels.

Next, let's have breakfast cooked over an open fire. Hurry up with the coffee!

The rocks block the sun in front of the fire. It would be easy to wrap up in a blanket and fall asleep on this cold and snowy day, which is what I end up doing.

Later, how about some Tai Chi?

It's a perfect transition to meditation, and I've found a great place to meditate:

In a cave filled with butterflies! Wake up!

Credits:

Hair is from D!va
Boho Bliss dress and shoes are from Witchwood
Shawl from AMD, my texture
Ears from Swallow
Campfire with coffee from Foxes
Tai Chi mat from Possessions
Yoga practice set from Concept}
Beech trees from 3D Trees
Butterfly Cave from LOVE

MU is Back!

For my first project, I made a History of Architecture house. The idea was to include as many architectural styles as possible in one house. Here's the result:

In the above picture, you can see the Greek Revival colonade, trimmed with Queen Anne gingerbread. The porch has Mexican tile. The bottom story has a Gothic Revival texture, and the top has a Tudor texture. It's topped with a Mansard roof. The dormers have rose windows. On top of that is a Romanesque dome, and on top of that, is an Italianate cupola flying an MU flag.

In back is a prairie style cantilever roof and balcony with craftsman windows. Inside, the bottom floor has an Asian texture, and the top is Baroque. Additionally, the house contains prims, sculpties, and mesh. You can see it here.

More Drinking and Drawing

I'm a bit behind in my documentation. A couple of weeks ago, our assignment in Drinking and Drawing was to draw another work by our chosen artist, but let our own style creep in as well. Here's my version of Franz Marc's "Tower of Blue Horses."

Last week's assignment was to do an original drawing in the artist's style. Here is my "Blue Dog x 3".

This was especially fun because I bought some new pastels. I haven't drawn anything in ages. Stay tuned for self portraits.

Blending and Drawing

Last week's Drinking and Drawing class assignment was to draw a work by another artist. I chose Franz Marc's piece, "Blue Horses". Here is my drawing:

I've also continued my Blender tutorials. I just finished the 301 class. It added more keyboard commands and how to snap to grid. Here's the exercise at the end:

In other news, I added more memory to my computer, and I can now see parts of mesh buildings that were invisible before. There are no more random textures in the water either. Before and after pictures of a mesh building on campus:

Artist Books

I thought that today, I would post some pictures of my artist books. The first one is "Shoes United". The text is a poem by Mike Buil. It's about a man who hits one of his shoes with a newspaper to keep it off the table. Chased across the room, "the shoe gave the signal a shoe gives when in trouble." An army of shoes hears the call and comes to the first shoe's rescue. They covered the man "like ants on a pink picnic popsicle."

The poem itself contains lots of wordplay, so the physical book had to as well. It's printed using the font, Footlight, on Arches paper. The paper is folded in such a way that it opens on three sides, so one reads the beginning, turns the book over and reads back the other way, then turns the book over again to read the ending. It has a shoe lace clasp. Little feet on the covers indicate the direction in which to read.

For illustrations, I photographed my shoes and the author's shoes, and turned them into line drawings in PhotoShop. Then I made polymer plates from the result. Here is a photo of my press when I was printing one color of the illustrations.

The next one is part of a series of postcards from places in literature. This one is a tunnel book, which means that it is made in layers, that when pulled out, form a tunnel. In "Greetings from Innsmouth", the tunnel is the bellows of the camera body that makes up its case. The vintage camera was not rare, and the bellows had crumbled into dust, so don't worry, no cameras were wantonly destroyed to make this book!

"Rags to Riches" was part of the "Valley of the Sunflowers" project. Local artists grew sunflowers in an urban vacant lot, and made paper from the plant fiber. This paper was given to area artists who created something on the theme of sustainability with it, and the resulting work was shown in a local gallery. My project was a letterpress printed accordion book. The covers are original cyanotypes made by laying wild flowers on treated paper.

The text was an old poem that goes in a circle, beginning and ending with the same line, combined with a call to make paper out of sustainable resources such as cotton or kenaf, rather than trees. Before 1830 paper was made primarily out of cotton, and it is generally still supple and white. Fiber from trees is inherently more acidic. For example, a modern newspaper becomes discolored after only a few hours in the sun.

Here is a photo showing the lovely golden color and texture of the sunflower paper. The illustration on the title page is a real letterpress dingbat, cast in lead, and letterpress printed. It is a reference to my paper mill in Second Life.

My imprint is Pyrrhic Press, which has a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/PyrrhicPress/timeline?ref=page_internal
I also make books as part of a collective, but that would be revealing my secret identity.   :)

Monkey See Monkey Do

Today I worked on the Blender class in a box #203. In this one we covered keyboard commands and learned how to use the camera. We also learned about the edit and object modes. (This isn't an imperial 'we', I'm just picturing myself in a class with other people.) This tutorial felt like I was really doing something because it had a hands on segment in which we imported a monkey onto the screen.

I'm also trying to decide which artist I want to use for my next Drinking and Drawing class. Anselm Kiefer? Ping Qui? Tibetan thangka painting?

Drawing and Dancing

My studies at Medici were interrupted for a time by events in real life. Since I got back in town, I've been trying to catch up. I missed one Drinking and Drawing class. The assignment was to draw a face. I did this one which served double duty because the assignment I missed was to draw an animal.

The subject of course was TL, hero of song and stories in real life. You can tell he's the sort who wears a tweed cap when driving his immaculate '59 Nash Metropolitan. The car has an elaborate number of chrome logos on the back that might have been taken from other cars given the disparity of fonts and sizes, but TL assures me that it was a factory option. The trunk contains 23 bags of Cheddar Jalapeño potato chips, and a 5 gallon drum of vegetable oil, which he uses instead of gasoline. Lays sponsors his F1 races, he explains. He also knows how to use a computer and how to mask text so that the supposed author doesn't see it until after it's published.

Last night's assignment was to do an abstract. Here is mine:

I also went through the 202 book on Blender, and learned more about how the interface works. This included going through the preferences and doing things like making PhotoShop the default editor. The program can work with a 3D mouse as well, which might be fun to play with.

DJ Keli has been doing a trance story-time around midnight on Sundays at KPO. I went to it for the first time, and enjoyed it very much. The story this week was Rapunzel. We discussed rampion, but no one had tried it. Was it really that good? Or was it a comment on exploitation, the child becoming a commodity, traded for a bowl of lettuce?