To people who come to me with questions about blogging I always preach tell that most important is… above all… what you should absolutely do is have continuity. Write an item once a week, or you will loose the people that stop by regularly to see what you are up to. Write! No matter how busy you are…….

Well… I’m kind of breaking my own iron rule here since the last post is from somewhere last month. I really didn’t sit still, so here is a little update. I’m at work now so no pictures at hand a.t.m. Two weeks ago I did another fashcon / group release of new items and reactions and sales have been really great. Thank you all for the great support and nice IM’s and reactions!

I’m going to pick up photography again and opened yet a third Flickr stream… this one will be restricted from the start. The images up there will be sl-photo expiriments in- and exploration of the latex fetish area with Latexia and Ellen as my main models. No real heavy stuff… however, a lot of latex and some nudity can be expected… When all is set, i’ll place the link to this stream here.

New plans for this blog/website are small: apart from putting the new items into my fashion database I will create model pages for the beauties that model for me so you know who is who…

Next to that I really hope to find some time to make new latex sets! My main addiction needs that fix(!!!)

More news soon ;)

In my last post I said so: I have (had) some time on my hands now to clean the house design some new items and since I’ve been playing with the idea of starting up some kind of premium label, I figured it was time to see what I could come up with. I worked with lace once before (on the Stellar corset) and thought it might be a good idea to pick up lace again!

You can see the first result here. I’ve created two sets and a corset which hopefully go on sale this week! Keep your eyes out for the Fashcon / group message! Finally ready too is Expo! The corset in the third picture is worn by a new face… Maybe some of you already know this lady. She will be modeling more outfits in the future next to Ellen and Tillie. This pretty lady is none other then Latexia!

[update] At this moment (today) i’ll be hanging the new items in the shop… I’m hoping to send a notice to the group today and will send a Fashcon notice tomorrow night!

Just a quick post here to let you know that German SL-style (in german) took the time to write an article about my current items! I really love the pictures and what Betty Tracer wrote about me. Second, Linnda Scofield did an interview with me on Dutch secondlife Style (in Dutch). Check out these blogs for more cool tips on virtual fashion

I have some time off upcoming days, so I hope to spend some time designing new items. If all goes as planned, the new items will be released somewhere next week! items like ‘Expo’ which a lot of people have been asking about…

When I’m thinking about what to tell here about making your own clothing textures, a lot of things come to mind… Let me first give you some global information about how I start a design (and in a next item how finish it). After that I’ll cover more detailed stuff. If you want to know something specific, let me know! When you start making clothing for second life there are numerous different things you need to know, or they are at least handy to know. Here are a few…

• Are you going to wear it yourself, or are you going to sell it? Or both? If you wear it yourself and there are some mistakes in it, no problem… If you are going to sell it, people in most cases will not tolerate mistakes (depending on the price too…). They may not complain, but will never return to your store for new items…
• What will you make? The better you know this the better you can work on a collection of items that work together (so you can mix and match!) and if you want to sell it people will know that to expect from you. You can always change if your choice isn’t working out for you.

How do I make a typical design from scratch? It is in most cases done in three steps:

• (have a good idea in your head and) sketch it on paper
• draw the design (in lines), this is the base for your design
• fill in the lines, add all the details, save and upload it

Sketching on paper

All my designs are mostly hand drawn. this means I draw the lines myself (doh…). It is also possible to use a picture from a piece of clothing or fabric and ‘paste’ it onto your avatar (photo sourcing), this can sometimes look spectacular, and sometimes like crap :) On the left you see Ellen wearing a never sold design (the only design) in which I used a picture of a blouse / shirt. (the original picture is from my rl gf who posed for the picture in one of my white shirts). The rest is hand drawn… A little note to that is that some of the details on my items are (part of) photo’s: small parts of belts and zippers.

When you have all these kind of figured out you can start without even touching your computer… The best way to get your ideas into shape is by drawing them on paper. You can easily correct things or start over… and more important: complicated software won’t break your concentration. When I started I’ve made that mistake so many times… ended up with no work done, forgot what I actually wanted to make in the first place and completely frustrated…
I know it can be hard to draw a human figure before you draw your design on it. So what you can do is put your avatar on a poser, against a white background and make a good frontal snapshot (and one of the back too) and print both images on a piece of paper. This way you only need to draw your idea over it.

Then there are some limitations in designing clothing for an avatar, most of them you need to find out while designing as I did in my first designs (which took me weeks and a lot of L$ while uploading the textures). Lines and textures sometimes just don’t look the same on an avatar as when you were drawing them in your texture. Textures get wrapped around the avatar body en there are places where the texture is stretched (a lot). (how this works can be seen in this blog of SL Natalia) Typical area’s that cause a lot of problems are the side of the boobs / under the armpits. Boobs in general (the bigger, the more stretch, the more blurred the detail will look…) and between the legs of an avatar… So basically don’t put (too much) detail in those places. On other places a straight line can show strange twists and the only thing to change that is to redraw your design.

Next item, more stuff about the use of programs and how I finish a design!

It has been a bit busy last days so I’m writing this message with a bit of a delay. The Luna set was finished, and sales started that night. I can say now that Luna is a big hit,  and I really love it!

Luna is a body with- and without garter bottom, stockings, gloves and a corset. The body itself comes in two flavors: a normal one, and one with a naughty open front. The complete set comes in three color combinations: white / pink, black / pink, and black. The body and corset have a matching print on it.

That’s it for me now, briefly! More to come, soon…

Yesh! New updates are ready and in shop… The wait is over, Ava 4.0 is for sale! I know, some of you had to wait a *long* time for it and finally: here it is! In the picture you see Ellen (yup, different skin, different hair) wear it in combination over the Cat 2 20% sheer catsuit. To finish the outfit Ellen put on a pair of black latex gloves and stockings.

The new items since last post here are:

• Ava 4.0
• Cat 2 black 10% sheer
• Cat 2 white 30% sheer
• Cat 2 white 70% sheer
• Cat red
• Cat purple
• Solar red
• Solar purple
• Chaps

You can click on one of the items to get all the information for that item! Right now I’m adding all the items to Onrez and SLexchange, so the links to the items on these website will be available very soon! To get a quick overview of these items, here are the vendor posters.

Next to the latex updates, I’ve also been rebuilding the shop and studio. Both were built sloppy and the shop was completely filled up. I needed to free some prims and create some space to be able to hang all new items in shop in future. Curious? See you there!!

Something different for a change. Why only use the blog to announce new releases? There is more to write about! Take for example questions that are asked me from time to time….

A recurring question is ‘how do you make clothing?’ or ‘is it easy to make your own clothing on second life?’ In upcomming posts I will show you how I do what I do. I hope this will make you, my readers, happy… (both of you haha).

• The things I am going to cover will not be complete tutorials, if you want to know something about a detail I seem to have skipped, just send me an email or comment on the post!
• My way to do things is not THE way to do it, there are a lot of techniques to design and make clothing for second life.

As always, you need the proper tools to create your own magic. I use a pen and paper, avipainter, adobe illustrator and adobe photoshop. Next to that, there is a package of body-part templates provided on the second life website which you can use to fit your clothing images on.

• Avpainter is a very handy program which gives you an avatar in a window on which you can paint. very simple. I don’t use this program all the time, only when I want to make a design which is completely new. (yes this means that a lot of clothing is created using something ‘old’ as a base for something new… this saves -a lot- of time.) When you are working on a design, you can also load it into avpainter to see if it works. uploading a texture to SL costs 10 L$ and it takes a lot of uploads to get everything right…. so avpainter can save you some money! It can be bought through slexchange.com
• Adobe Illustrator. When a design is drawn in Avipainter, it is imported into illustrator and used as a template to draw the clean lines in. If you have another programm in which you can draw lines quickly, you can use that!
• Adobe photoshop. I use it to finish my designs, change colors, ad details like paterns, shades… I really can’t think of designing clothing without photoshop. Some people use an alternative like paintshop pro or Gimp. As a websdesigner in rl I use photoshop every day.. There is little it can’t do and I cannot imagine desinging stuff without it…

Next to these tools you need a good deal of creative energy, patience and time. Designing clothing for you avatar is hard, especially in the beginning, so my advice is: ’start simple’ (with a T-shirt for example) and work your way up to a detailed outfit consisting of more pieces of clothing…

One of the best websites for detailed tutorials… no, the best website for tutorials is SL Natalia’s blog. She has covered everything you can possibly think of in relation to designing (clothing) in second life…

In upcoming posts I will cover how I start/make/finish a design…

There is one more question which is asked me a lot… it is: ‘How do you make these realistic latex shines?’ I’m sorry but this will remain my secret ;)

It has been a busy week! Not only did a number of new items end up in the shop, I sent out the first group-notice in the Hugo’s design group. I also sent out my first Fashcon notice. For those of you who don’t know what Fashcon is, look at the website. In short it is a large network for fashion addicts and designers. Designers can post an update once a week. This is for all kind of fashion, so not only fetish stuff like most of my items… New notices are on the way!

I have been working on my website some more recently. All is working the way I want it to, now all I need is to make the fashion section look good… you can browse my items by outfit type. All items have full information included and a link to SLexchange and Onrez so you can buy them there if you like. Only thing that still needs to be enabled is the ‘related items’. More about that in an upcoming post.

New items that actually have been released in the store are:

• the luxon corset, black / red
• the luxon corset, black / white
• the luxon corset, black / red - Cat black combination
• the luxon corset, black / white - Cat black combination
• Cat 2 black 70 percent sheer catsuit with and without seams
• Cat 2 black 20 percent sheer catsuit with and without seams
• Shirt - Funk in six colors

Next to these items I was able to add three new items yesterday too ( a notice will be sent out today or tomorrow)

• Solar corset - white
• Cat white, white latex catsuit
• Solar white / Cat white combination

One item I didn’t manage to get into the shop is the purple version of the Solar corset. That will probably happen tonight. Here are all Vendor posters so you can see the items a bit better… The Solar white etc… pictures will follow later…

A lot has happened since I last wrote my last entry here. You may have noticed that the picture under ‘latest fashion post in Flickr’ is missing… This is because Flickr set my fashion account to ‘restricted’ which means that you need to be logged into the Flickr website to see the pictures. This is the second time my items / pictures are sencored… and in all honesty, again it is my mistake. I applied the filters too loosely. Again the only thing which got me kind of pissed is the fact that you don’t get a warning before something like this happens. I would have gladly (re)set the filters myself, keeping my account open for everyone… I’ll keep posting my designs there, only for my contacts to see…

Then some good news: Yesterday Sunshine Kukulcan surprised me with a blogpost about my Second Life shop! How cool!!

And I’m saying it for some time now, new items are on the way. I just want everything to be spot on when I start releasing all new items. New will also be notices send out with new releases. I’ll be sending notices through my ow update group (let me know if you want to be on it, just send me an IM or click the ‘add to group’ box in my main shop! Next to my own update group, notices will be sent through the Fashcon.com network!

Soo… what will be the new latex items for the upcomming weeks? here are some…. you’ll find new color versions of the basic catsuit ‘Cat’. I’m starting off with a red and white one. There also will be new color versions the Solar corset (and yes you guessed right, I’ll start off with a red and white one). Next to that there will be a new catsuit: ‘Cat 2′ this is a new sheer catsuit with- and without seams. I’m starting those with sheer black and white ones and a translucent one. Other colors will follow. There is a new corset which I called ‘Solar 2′ for now… not sure about that name yet. Ava 4 (see previous post) will finally come (combined with a pair of chaps, possibly the kinkiest release so far.. hehe). And there will be more shirts and outfits.. here are some first look pictures (sometimes combining the unfinished sets):

Yey! I finally managed to finish a picture / photo which I had sitting on my desktop for a very long time. I had an idea for a multi-mirror shot and Zaza Moo was my model. Constructing the image appeared to be somewhat difficult and right now my rl company is doing really well, so little time is left for projects as these. You can always come to me for model shots, but right now I am not taking on new projects other than the ones I initiate myself. (If you want model shots, you can contact Tillie Ariantho. She is a very talented model and photographer.)

As for my second job… *grin* IM messages have been sent to me, asking me when new stuff is finally going to be available. It is coming, and I hope I can get all that I want to make in store soon. There are many items which are (almost) finished (see the picture of Ellen for example, wearing Ava 4.0 over a brand new 10 percent sheer catsuit (Cat 2) with seams).

My head is filled with new ideas and the base of all latex outfits has been recreated and somewhat perfected this weekend. Now all I need is time and creative energy to make all the new sets… and more important, get them into the shop!