Sunday. Raining. Looking at the drizzle streaming down the window glass. Taking a break from work ... still not finished the job! Celestial gentlemen with long white beards, sitting on clouds, might have the option of resting on the seventh day, but if they were down here they'd have to get their sleeves rolled up and get stuck in. So while taking a break, I grabbed the opportunity to play with one of the items I bought a little while ago -- here, you're seeing part of it.
It's the Euros costume for M4, and it's actually a set of trousers, overskirt and shirt, but since I'm chronically short of time I decided to play with it one piece at a time. Skirt first. It comes with a very nice kind of chainmail texture, plus several other lovely textures ... and I added an opacity map to one of them, to make it over into a kind of loosely hand-woven fabric which wouldn't leave a heck of a lot of the imagination!
Tomorrow, I'll have a look at the shirt and the trousers which go under the overskirt, and play with textures and morphs. Incidentally, the morphs on the Euros overskirt are very good. The only one that beat me was the kneeling one -- couldn't get it to wrap under the leg. I imagine the morphs to do this are actually there, but you'd need a little bit more time than I have today! So I finished that one with a little bit of digital painting --
Which gave me another excuse to play in Photoshop Elements 9 ... hmmm. Well, sure, you can do this bit of airbrushing in PSE9, but the tools are so cumbersome, the process is so long -- again, I ran out of time. Confession: I ran home to Micrografx and did the job in the 37 seconds I actually had left. My kingdom for the time to play -- seriously, just to play with art and software and so on. One day.
Jade, 10 July
