Hey everyone,

I've decided it would be fun to try something new. Whether it's Second Life content, computer art, video games, movies, music or anything similar I'm personally always fascinated in the process that goes into making anything creative. I'm sure there are others like me who might be interested in the process of creating something for Second Life.

With that in mind I've decided to start a creator's diary on a new fantasy avatar we're just starting work on. While I'm not going to go through every technical step, the idea is to give some insight into how an idea starts, some of the steps along the way and ultimately what we end up with in the end. I have no idea how many parts there will be or how long it may take but hopefully some of you out there find it interesting

A few months ago we released our popular female drow avatar:

She was a lot of fun to work on and we felt it was high time we did a male version as well. While I already sell a male drow skin I wanted to do a series based of the newer Envision male skin line. The skins were completed relatively quickly in both blue and black to match the female tones. The fun part is now coming up with the design of the character himself.

The only thing I knew I definitely wanted to do going in was that I really wanted to make a hooded cloak for him so that quickly led into making him into a ranger. Before starting it's usually a good idea to know where you're going on an avatar (or any design actually) so the easiest thing to do is make a sketch. It doesn't have to be a great sketch but having a road map is going to make everything a lot easier.

I started by wearing one of the new drow skins (also, the observant of you might notice some new elf ears as well ), finding a nice pose and taking a snapshop.

Then I took that snapshot into Photoshop and started sketching some ideas over the image. Very loose at first but after about an hour or so I ended up with a design I thought was pretty cool and would be fun to make. I could take the drawing a lot further and make it look better but for my purposes a quick sketch was fine.

Here he is without the hood:

Although I was happy with the design Polly felt that the colours weren't really in line with the popular image of drow culture so I reworked them a little bit and came up with something that worked better with the lore and was maybe a little bit more bad-ass:

So that's our starting point. It may and probably will change as we start working on the individual pieces but hopefully it turns out well in the end!

We'd love to hear feedback so if anyone has comments they can leave them here or get in touch with us in world.

Take care!

Max