Color Challenge: Week Thirty-three - Mahogany

The color chip for Mahogany Week didn't look very mahogany to me, so I ended up deviating to a browner color based on a mahogany shade of hair from Ingenue. I picked this up ages ago, I think when Ingenue had a sale of old designs or something - not completely sure. Usually fatpacks of color are cheapies or gifts, though; when I'm paying full price I just pick up my blonds and call it a day.

One interesting thing about how I tend to play in second life is that my accounts - even across different mediums - have a coherent personality and appearance. When I'm Deoridhe, I'm almost always a blond; when I'm not, I tend to consider it more in line with me dying my hair than an actual change in color that will stick. In terms of identity, my online identity using Deoridhe is far more coherent and long-standing than anything connected with my offline identity - though the latter also exists in bits and pieces.


Other aspects of my appearance shift from platform to platform, though. On various blogs, I'm represented by a drawing made of me; on Gaia Online I often have a halo and mini-headwings which I managed to get through various means. On Second Life, I always have my wings and I usually have my ears. My eyes change now and then, but when they do it's a change from one kind of eye to the next. The only times I change my appearance otherwise are for pictures like these, or when I'm roleplaying and that demands a certain look.

In this case, I began with the hair and then found the flapper stockings from Sonatta Morales, which was a slightly different shade of brown - adding some complexity to finding a dress to bind them together. I love the little bows on the front, though; I'm a huge fan of combining system-layer clothing with prims to make something much more realistic. Sorting through my brown clothing folder, I happened to put on The Secret Store's, Maylee Oh's Cookie Rain, though, and found it had a mixing of browns which tied together the more reddish hair and the more yellow-orange stockings into a coherent whole.

The addition of teal to the color-scheme was a welcome one, especially after all of the other brown pictures I've taken, where I ended up more monochrome and neutral. I also loved the length - right above those bows on the stockings! - and the fact it was a more high-waisted dress. The fit was a bit of a challenge for my shape, though - since the skirt prims go higher than the belt, the curve of the body mesh is used to cut them off so they look skirt-like. This meant when I leaned forward I got a rather unattractive V of skirt prims hanging down, though, which made finding poses (from Olive Juice - as always, fantastic moods for them) more of a challenge. My guess is it';s pretty difficult to "top" a skirt without running the points inside of the body mesh, though; this is more something to work around than a complaint which can be fixed.


The next hard thing to place were the wings and shoes. I initially tried my usual Azarelle wings from Fancy Fairy, but the location I ended up in - AM Radio's gorgeous Surface art-sim - uses extensive amounts of transparent prims to make the translucent effect slightly captured in these pictures. What this meant is that whichever way I turned, the wings would vanish or look odd due to Second Life's Alpha Layer issues; it just looked horrible, to put it frankly. I discovered at that point that I had no brown wing on me, and very few color changing wings that weren't also alpha-using. I ended up settling on TERHO's Elda Wings in black; the brownish-orange of the top decorations matched, and I don't think it looks entirely bad, but part of me wants to try this look again with more time to individually tint wings to match; I think it would be truly impressive.

The shoes are from Duh!, and also involved some work since they were sold pre-alpha layer, and I've become an alpha-layer shoe snob. Luckily, Duh! shoes come modify-ok, which meant some time on a pose-stand, and a matching of alpha-foot types to the shoe led to make these glorious shoes catch up to the latest Second Life technology. This turned out to be a wonderful thing, because there are layers of alpha on the ground as well as in the sky, so if I hadn't been able to update the shoes the halo effect would have been hideous. As it is, these lovely shoes look their best!


The accessories were perhaps the easiest part - the pipe in particular. First I'll talk about the jewelry, a set including necklace, bracelets, and earrings from ME_gems (I've no idea the store name - since everything is prim-only, it comes up as no one made it under preferences; if anyone knows what this store is, that would be awesome). The pipe was a gift, though, from my friend Charlie who runs De La Soul. It's a fantastic pipe, with an accompanying hud which lets you change between tons of different colors. In this case I matched it up with the teal and brown over-theme, shifting it from side to side in my mouth to suit the different pictures. It can easily go from neutral, to flamboyantly colorful, to shiny white and gold, to dark and forboding with a few clicks on a hud. It also smokes, and the coals in the bowl glow and glint slightly, as if they were on fire. I'm not normally a pipe-smoker, but after she gave me this I kept it in through three different outfit changes; expect to see it more in the future, as well!


( More pictures here. )

Credits:

Eyes: De La Soul, RooMee Eyes - Rainbow
Skin: De La Soul, Charlie - Phoenix
Cosmetics: De La Soul, Charlie Makeup - Teal Tribal
Ears: Illusion, Mystic Ear
Wings: TERHO, Elda Wings - Black
Hair: Ingenue, Torch Song Updo - Mahogany
Pipe: De La Soul, Underwood Pipe
Jewelry: ME_gems, Driftwood
Dress: The Secret Store, Maylee Oh's Cookie Rain
Stockings: Sonatta Morales, Flapper Stockings - Mahogany
Shoes: Duh!, Espadrille - Teal Green

Location: Surface
Light Settings: Fairy blue (Paulina)

Photographed by Deoridhe Quandry
Post processing: Cropping only