What I Like #57

So much of the art I feature each week comes from the many wonderful bloggers of Second Life. I love browsing the different blogs and seeing the new clothes, the adventures and the experiments that people are doing while living their second lives. There are several feeds that aggregate the work of many bloggers into an easy to browse collection, but this column requires that I browse a broader network, so I often browse people’s blogrolls and their Flickr and KoinUp favorites. I like to find new people every week, cognizant that it is easy to get into habits and feature those who are reliably excellent every time. So I encourage you all to click those fave buttons and add to your blogrolls, building that web of connections that bring even the most far flung blogs and artists into sight.

Following favorites is how I came across the work of Thea Maiman on KoinUp and Flickr.  She combines fantasy with surrealism in a unique blend that’s exciting and fresh. Some of her pieces have a pre-Raphaelite romanticism with loving attention lavished on the lights and shadows of beautiful nudes. She uses layers to give texture, context and dimensionality to her work. For example, the dust and scratches added to this work place it in the past, in an earlier, less cynical time. I love the rich, saturated blues. It’s wonderful that she used yellow, the opposite of blue, for the bird, giving the picture an additional spark of energy. The angle is intriguing and yet still positions the subject so she looks into the frame.  The contrast between the light and dark is intense and makes her skin seem to glow as though dusted by moonlight.

And then Thea Maiman produces System Error, something completely different, an amazing surreal duotone whose details and subtleties have been erased by filters, leaving the outlines and suggestions of the sea, the fields and sky, turning them into a wildly imaginative and fantastical landscape. I love this and would love to know how she produced it. I can guess that she used the find edges filter, perhaps, one or two of the art filters – adding the pointillist effect. Perhaps a layer to give the moon those retro dots. But it’s all guesswork.  In terms of composition, you can see the horizon is at two thirds of the way up and the dark rock in the front tops out at one-third. The two avatars are near the right vertical third and their bodies for a triangle. Notice, too, how they and the rock in the foreground are so much darker than the colors in the distance – giving us a sense of depth and distance that could have been lost with the elimination of many of the details we are used to. I like how the umbrella is the same size and angle of the moon – a clever echo of its shape. Truly, there is so much to fascinate me in this picture  - as though by limiting the color and the detail, she exposed more ideas and revealed a deeper truth.

And for something completely different, there is this irresistibly adorable picture from Caelan Hancroft. It’s a good composition, the subject off-center and looking into the frame. The use of depth-of-field to blur the details in the foreground and background give a dash of realism to the fantasy bunny. The tree beautifully frames the photo. The horizon follows the rule of thirds and look at the flowers – three of them, following the rule of odds.

I love the rich colors in Evion Ember’s picture for Another Damn SL Blog. Usually this is achieved by making a copy of the original layer and then changing the blending option to Soft Light. Sometimes that makes the darks too dark, losing details, but you can adjust curves to address that. Elysium Elide has a great tutorial on how to do that. I love that she used complementary colors blue and yellow, orange and green. It’s a bold photo and really captures my attention.

I love this composite from Whimsy Winx for her blog, Virtually Dressed. I like how the two central pics cross each other and are almost, but not quite mirror poses. The arms crossing each other is so clever that it more than compensates for them turning away from each other. The two outer pictures are great crops that give us the details of the dress, showing off the skill of the creators, but also engaging us in completing elements of the picture, drawing us into and making us interact with the photos.

I like this photo from Justyna Magne of Just Magnetized. Again, here is someone using complementary colors to make our neurons happy. In fact, in almost seems as though there is a shade of yellow for every shade of blue. As with most good compositions, the subject and horizon are placed according to the rule of thirds. In addition, the subject looks into the frame and has a place to move forward. Why she is carrying those hug and heavy bullets while wearing high heels and looking so fresh, I don’t know. Perhaps she was on a train derailed by revolutionaries and has joined the revolution despite her bourgeois upbringing – inspired by love for the handsome leader of the cadre or perhaps not. It’s always fun to imagine stories when pictures have little details that ask for explanations.

I love this photo from LouLou Teichmann for La Mia Bauhaus. I love the rich contrasts of light and dark and how it seems framed by black on three sides even though she only added black lines at the top and bottom. While at first glance it seems a duotone, you can see tiny bits of color, the red feather, her lip color and the faintest hint of blush in her cheeks. It has an old almost vaudevillian feeling that I like.

I like this photo from Angels Milena for her self-titled blog. The framing has nice details with its three colors, the inner frame only semi-opaque so the photo shows through. I like how she cropped the picture so we are completing the shoe, the top of her head and her knee. This is a technique that makes our brain work a little harder and that always makes pictures more memorable. The pose gives us great lines and adds to the pictures dynamic energy.

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Fricker

and people say there is no life in second life.. great post of showing the amazing creativity and life in Second Life

Cajsa or Oscar

Thanks!!!

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