Beautiful Second Life Shakespeare Tableau In Style of Dutch Master Created With Little Post-Production

Second Life photo by Alpha Auer from her Flickr stream

This Second Life photo (and I do mean photo) is detail from a series created by brilliant Turkish designer Elif Ayiter, known and admired in Second Life as an avatar named Alpha Auer. It's a collection of poses re-enacting various scenes from Shakespeare's sonnets in a setting created by Alpha, modeled after the painting style of Dutch master Rachel Ruysch. And while you might think the crystalline, chiaroscuro images are heavily altered screenshots, Ms. Auer achieved this look primarily with WindLight presets and lighting sources within Second Life. "With some," she tells me, "there is some very minor subsequent tonal adjustment in Photoshop, but I try to get 99% of what I want to achieve in-world through the placement of 'artificial' lights and the sky preset. So, needless to say it takes me around 6-8 hours to set each of these scenes up." The overall effect is totally arresting. In fact they're so beautiful, I'm embedding the whole set after the break:

See high-res versions here, and read more about it on Alpha Auer's blog. You can visit her set in-world [SLurl], albeit without the preset and lighting scheme that gives these photos their magic.

Hat tip: via Bonibaru Navarathnanibar

Comments

[Winter Wardhani]

Alpha is an amazing artist whom I am proud to call friend. Her creations are simply chin dropping and I think I have her whole store in my inventory since the very begining when she was still playing around with skin painting and prims for "weird" costumes. I am glad you posted this! Alpha is for sure one of the most imaginative and creative people I met in SL during these almost 4 years :o)

[Alpha Auer]

My goodness! Thank you NWN! I had no idea that Rachel Ruysch had been blogged until just a second ago.

The url of the actual tale of which the images are illustrations in a way is this one here btw:
http://ruyschavatars.tumblr.com/

It is a non-nonsensical tale of avatars based upon Shakespearean sonnets.

The slurl will take people to an empty place however. I dismantled the last stage and never got round to working out the next episode of the tale. Hopefully there will be a new one soon.
:-)

Again, THANK YOU

[Hamlet Au]

Switched the URL, Alpha, thanks! I missed that they were based on S's sonnets (and not plays), so fixed that.