I’ve been chatting a bit to grazia Horwitz recently and we thought it wouldbe fun to have a contest to give a newbie a makeover.

Grazia has posted all the details on the second style blog but in brief what you can win is a complete makeover from my store that you can choose, including shape,skin, clothes, gown, hair and some shoes very kindly donated by fallingwater of Shiny Things!

http://blog.secondstyle.com/

Second prize wins a shape/skin package from the store.

How to participate:

* entrants must not be older than 60 days on May 31st 2007

* submit a notecard to Sachi Vixen in which you write why YOU need a MAKE OVER and need it DESPERATELY. No need to say that the funnier, the more hilarious or the more heart breaking, the better. But keep it concise, not more that 150 words. Name the notecard NEWBIE MAKE OVER, [your name]

*In the notecard include 2 photos of your avatar(name them NEWBIE MAKE OVER, [your name]. Size 512 x 512. One photo including you from head to toe, and one that you like (or hate, since you want that make over!). NB: submissions that do not have the photos IN the notecard will not be considered.

*After May 31st, 12 pm SLT is it NOT possible to submit notecards anymore. Any submissions that will be received after that time will not be taken into consideration.

So if you are new and need a makeover, or have a friend, or even meet a newbie who needs help. Point them this way!

It seemed inappropriate to have links on the front page of the site that were of more personal interest to me, because the front page is very much a business page. So I decided to move them to the sandbox here which is very much more my personal area of the site. I date the articles here so that they cdon’t fall directly onto the front page so I’dd add todays date here so you know when it was posted 30 April 07. So these are some of the site I enjoy checking out now and then, or the sites of friends of mine.

Sol
Roslin
Ceira
Fashionista Fan CC

The sandbox is a place for me to write up some tips or tutorials when I have time. Are there enough hours in the day?!

I’ve been in a hair making mood recently so I thought I’d kick off the sandbox area by talking a little about hair making or how I make hair anyway. I learned to make hair just before flexi prims came to second life but didn’t make very much until then. My first flexi hair was just made for fun and only offered in one colour but I had such a big response from people that I made more and more.

I have to confess that working with prims is not my favourite thing, skin making is my joy which is bizarre as this is one of the hardest and most time consuming of all the things that I make for second life. What I like about hair is that the prims don’t have to be ordered, regular or precise. Just playing with them and tugging them around can often produce quite pretty styles and my style of building is very much tug and play, much to the frustration of my more precise builder friends.

I think good texturing helps with hair and there are some great tutorials on the web for making hair textures. If you aren’t very good at drawing or hand painting and feel frustrated by the thought then sometimes you can make a texture from a surprising thing. Try taking a picture of the bristled head of a broom and load to your pc (or find one on the net that is copyright free to use). Crop your image so that you just have a picture of the bristled part. Set your picture as overlay, flood fill a colour layer under the overlay and play about with it, change the opacity, blur a little around the edges. You can get some dramatic effects that can look very realistic and you will surprised that unlikely things, like a plate of spaghetti or a broom head can make some excellent hair textures.

I am blond in real life so I always start a new hair textured blond. I use a pose stand and build the hair around my head. I have a very average head size on my avatar, size 50 and I find this works well for hair making. I start out with a torus prim usually, though you can use other shapes for a hair base and I like to experiment.

Place the torus on your head, impaling the ends into the avatar scalp (ouch!) and build a base all around your head. Your base shape does not have to be perfect or regular, the hair can still look very nice if it isn’t. After all real hair isn’t perfectly formed or aligned so there is no real reason why avatar hair must be.

When you’ve covered your scalp and have a basic shape, it’s time to add the shaped prims that give a style to your hair. To get your curled, wavy, or straight shapes you need to play with the torus, change the settings in the edit box and see what shapes that you can make that will work for your hair. I usually make a selection of shapes at this point and then copy them into the hair, turn them, roatate and drag until I am happy. I seldom plan hard when I make hair and often start with a vague idea that evolves as I make the hair. This hair is going to be an updo so I won’t be adding any flexi to it this time but I like cylinders for flexi myself. I feel they give the nicest, most realistic appearance and movement for hair.

Your hair style will quickly take shape and it may not turn out how you imagined it in the beginning, mine never does but I am often more pleased with the result than I might have been with my initial idea. I usually link up the parts of the hair as I go along so I don’t forget pieces. I’ll link up the base when it’s done, then will link the next 3 or 4 pieces to the base and so on. For me, the hair is finished when it looks pretty on my avatar, that’s when I decide to close and make the colours.

Then I wear the hair for the first time, adjust the position slightly, something that you nearly always need to do after wearing the first time, and then I add the colour change script I use for fun in the root prim. This script cost me 100L and is very useful and fun.

After that I will texture the hair colours that I plan to offer for sale.

This is the finished hair, I called it Salome!

People often ask about skin making in second life. There are some excellent skins on the grid and they are the standard which is already set that you need to aspire to. Here are my top ten tips to give you something to think about when deciding that you want to make skins.

1. Read all of the second life web site information on making clothes and skin and using the templates provided. There are no short cuts, no quick fix. If making skins well was easy everyone would do it.

2. Know your graphics program. You will need to be familiar with your graphics program to make good skins or clothes so spend a little time each day just playing with it and learning how to do things, where different tools are and what they do. People use many graphics programs. I have photoshop CS2 and paint shop pro 7 on my computer. I use both for different things and both have tools that I like better than the other.

3. Before you jump into skin, get to know the templates that are provided on the second life site
Second Life and become familiar with them, and how they correspond to the human body. Remember that you are making something which will wrap around a 3d mesh and it is important to aware of this when you are working. This is why nipples and shading can sometimes be distorted on an avatar, be aware of how the 3 shape works so that it will help you to mold your skin to
it successfully.

4. Try making t shirts and other items of clothing before you start on skins. This is great practice for knowing where the joins and seams of the avatar are and how the textures work on a 3d mesh.

5. Look at lots of pictures of naked people and faces. These will help you to become comfortable and familiar with human anatomy, something you need to help you to make a nice skin. Too often people think it’s all about make up and don’t think about the back or the back of the legs etc. These are all areas you will have to make on your skin.

6. Get an old fashioned sketch pad and pencil and practice drawing still life and particularly shading, as this is vital for a good skin. Even if you think you aren’t the best artist, learning how the body parts look, how and where it curves and what shapes it has will help you improve, no matter what your drawing ability. Practice really does make perfect.

7. Look at skin colours, particularly in lots of images of people of different tans and ethnicity. Make yourself a chart of skin colour swatches that you can use later for colouring your skintones.

8. Be patient, persistant and prepared to work quite hard as making skin can involve many hours of work to get things right.

9. Try to organise your work as much as possible and name and number everything so that you know which file you are working on.

10. Save everything you do every 10 minutes. I have crashed before and been unable to work on a file I had almost completed. If you have a save from ten minutes before, you can work from that, if you don’t and your file won’t open, you may be right back where you started.

Good luck, have fun!