New release in the works...

The grand opening and fashion show were quite the project to complete. It's a thrill to be open for business again, to see Spirit City free of ban lines and open to the public. But in the wake of so much clothing design and event preparation, like eating too much of a good thing, my "designer's palette" needed a bit of cleansing. So I returned to a project that I've been working on for a quite a while now, one that has at times left me alternately yearning, frustrated, depressed, and resigned. Skins. You hear often from skin designers how difficult skins are to create, and I'll admit that before embarking on a line of my own, I sometimes wondered if those designer remarks were a tad bit of overdrawn artist postering, lol. Well, I am here to tell you emphatically and soul-baringly honestly that the skin designers weren't lying, weren't postering, weren't overstating the case even a bit.

Designing skins is HARD!

I began designing my own believing it would be a breeze to do, that perhaps they wouldn't turn out perfectly right off the bat, but like clothes, my skin designs would start off fairly well and improve the more I practiced. Ha! Time and again I spent days working a layer, only to throw my hands up in frustrated despair and give up for a while. Designing skins takes every bit of skill ever learned from designing clothes, plus much, much more. Because if you choose not to photosource your skin, you are choosing to be in effect a true artist. Every muscle highlight and shadow, every ripple in the skin, every line and curve of the eyes and nose and mouth, is a digital brushstroke resulting in guesswork and decision based on countless hours of studying photos of real people in every pose imagineable. I couldn't even tell you how many uploads I ended up making, testing and retesting, tweaking, lightening, darkening, moving a single shadow higher or lower over the body until it looked right in-world. Only to hear from my rl family that what I thought looked great was definitely not and needed to be fixed fast, lol.

And after ALL this dramatic prelude, all this explanation of the sweat and toil that truly goes into a designer's first skin... I am happy to announce that I have completed a skin I am finally happy with! It's not perfect, and I know I will be adding to it continually before I release the first line for sale. But for my first skin, I'll confess I'm pretty darn proud.

Want to see it? No, I will not be putting up pics here, at least not yet. It's not ready to be released for sale. I still have tons of versions of hair color and freckle layers to make and alternate makeup options and skin tones to complete. So you'll have to wait a while for all of that to be posted here. BUT if you're a member of the SPIRIT Fan Group, you'll receive the very first SPIRIT skin, one created especially to go with the Nutcracker Sugarplum Fairy set released last week, completely FREE! I would appreciate all feedback offered on this first skin, but do try to be constructive in your criticism so I know specifically what needs improvement and what you'd like to see in the form of options, changes, etc. The freebie release to the group will be going out momentarily, so don't miss it!