Makara Yorimasa

I meant to finish some work around Safe Harbor, but one way or another, I ended up spending a lot of the bank holiday weekend chatting to people. One of them was the lovely Linuxess, a member of Thinc, who was looking for a new skin. We went to Snowflake Skins, which have the most kawaii designs in SL, IMHO, and I'm delighted to say that she bought a very pretty anime-style pale skin with huge eyes and petal pink lips (you can see it on her blog which is listed on my links). She had been looking for a realistic skin, but I think I persuaded her that it is nice to be a little more cartoony sometimes, which brings me on to the subject of this post.

Aesthetics are a personal thing, of course, so what I'm going to give here is my personal opinion. SL is basically a cartoon environment at the moment - it's not sophisticated enough yet to handle "Final Fantasy" levels of detail - so when I'm designing, shopping or building in SL, I try to bear this fact in mind. For this reason, I avoid ultra-photorealistic textures at all times, prefering a more painterly effect. I don't mind how wiggy or off-the-wall buildings and clothes are - or how safe and boring they are - but I do think a photographic texture looks out of place in an animated cartoon world.

Particularly jarring are plants, but I also find textures representing bookcases, or cupboards full of food, etc. quite unpleasant to look at. I have been installing a kitchen in Gabe's refurbished house this morning, and have had a lot of trouble finding attractive fittings (I don't want him to have a kitchen that looks as if I've slapped a polaroid of a cooker over the top of a square block).

Of course the first thing I should do is to enrol on a building course and learn how to make my own textures. I'll look into this tonight.