Of Skin and Trees

When I am depressed, or stressed I either build, forgo logging in, or build avatars just for the sake of building avatars.

This time I am doing a mixture of the three, so the Tree village is going slowly.

And I have been distracted by some avatar building. I've not opened any new accounts, I am just using somewhat neglected alts to try and build 3-d versions of the people that live in my head. (most of whom have never seen the inside of Second life. You see, after years of role-playing, and being a lapsed writer, I have many people I love in my imagination. There is something rewarding about watching them move.

I was pretty successful in making a beloved Argyria-stricken Mountain Elf of my husband's. Said husband then asked if I was going to do his counterpart.

So I thought I would give it a go, and I have learned a few things on the way.

1) I only use two basic skins for my female and child avatars. (one is a template I can make my own from. The other, an awesome group gift.)
2) Most of those skins (that I make) look quite different, as I put them on differing faces. The templates allow for a lot of tinkering and results. However...
3) Those skins are starting to look to much alike.

You see the character I am now trying to build bears just enough similarities to Korinna, (being that they are both female.) that my template made skins look too much like Korrinna to work. No matter what I do to them, when I put them on this girl's face (she has an entirely different face structure on the sliders) she looks too much like Korinna to be individual.

It is very frustrating. I hate the skin shuffle, once I got Korinna's skin down perfectly, I was majorly relieved. People who used to actually read this blog must have been relieved too, because it was all I bitched about.

Which leads me to something else I have learned.

4) While it used to be the other way around, finding skins for females is WAY harder than it is for males.

Do you know why? The products for males caught up just enough that the stores and creators are well known. Most male skins are high quality, realistic skins.

But the female skin market has become so saturated, it's hard to know where to start. And the usual cliche's apply. Loads and loads of makeup, big faking looking bewbies, and lips that are bigger than the bewbies.

I'm really stumped as to what to do, especially since I don't really want to spend any money, and the one skin mall I knew of that had good mania boards has gone the way of many sims... offline.

Anyway, back to the tree village project.

Husband is working hard on making a lift, I have some textures that need making, and to re-texture every poorly textured house. I have neighbors across route 9 now, that also have a tree house. Theirs is better... for now. ::rubs hands together:: I have far more buildings than I shall ever need, but if I want it to look village-y I think I have to keep them.

But in terms of progress, I had a beautiful pirate move a beautiful ship into my little bay, which is a serious boon! I have a zip line to purchase, and many roofs to make. It is coming along, but very slowly. This morning I will head in for a little bit to try and work out some of the issues.

One thing I dread, is I have to take all of the foliage off the tree houses in order to build for now, which is the opposite of what I *wanted* to do. But, there is no way to work around them. After that I will have to replace the foliage a piece at a time. Hopefully this will be a way to reduce prims, I just hope I can do it realistically.