Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Duraya creates such intriguing pictures, I had to ask her how she does it. It’s clear she combines Second Life screenshots with her own sketches, but I was curious if she also used AI and other methods. She was kind enough to pick three of her pictures that illustrate her three main approaches to creating an image.
“I joined SL out of curiosity and for socializing and stayed mainly for the wide field of creativity it offers,” Duraya tells me. She started making screenshots in 2021 and over time, learned how to use all of SL’s tools. “So from playing with WindLights and shadows I gradually added various ways of post processing until finally taking up using AI too.”
Her first approach is pure Second Life with minor post-processing touch ups.
She starts by “taking pictures in SL and using WindLights that help me approach my idea of the result I seek, refining with different graphic programs – I usually use more than one. Either it stops here or I add some small gif, like a few strands of moving grass or a bird blinking its eyes and so on. It enlivens the image and as this is a virtual world we are less limited here in the way we express ourselves. I simply loved the forest and the dark and mysterious mood the WindLight added to it.”
For two more Duraya images and methods, click here:
“Routinely Repairs” illustrates how she will build a set for her picture that is then shot in Second Life.
“Second is creating a scene for expressing something that would not be found in SL this way. I make a background – lately often using an AI image based on pictures I had taken before – thus visually prompting the character and colors it should have. Then I use my building skills adding any kind of objects needed for getting the right effect and atmosphere.
“Further on I change my avatar to make it my model and last I add a pose. Then it’s like taking any other picture – shoot, crop, post-process, done.”
Duraya illustrates the need for social repairs that are constantly necessary in an inegalitarian society that values beauty over character. Her title “Routinely Repairs” makes me think of the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam or “Repair the World.” Tikkun Olam is understood today as an obligation to work for social justice, not just for one’s personal benefit, but for society as a whole. (Although I am not Jewish, I used to subscribe to Tikkun, a magazine devoted to the concept of repairing the world.)
After digging into AI options and learning how to work with them, she starts to combine SL screenshots with a gen AI-based image.
She will combine screenshots with an AI image to add a certain effect. Sometimes she creates a completely different AI image to get the result she wants.
“I mostly layer these images and redo and change over and over again until my vision and the picture click. There is a lot of discussion ongoing about the use of AI and I guess some of it is legitimate. But then it's just another tool you can use like a brush or a camera, so if you master it to some extent and make it help visualize your inner pictures it's just a new process of creating.
“The 'eyes' I made for a contest where songs (The Night Has a Thousand Eyes) had to be turned into pictures. I didn't like the song much but I loved how it inspired me to make this picture anyway”
Duraya is an artistic adventurer - experimenting with new forms while using Second Life as her palette. I love how she combines her screenshots with her own drawing and with AI.
As she explains it: “The degree of freedom for creativity increases from only having the option of choosing the subject (dark forest taken in SL), angle, light and so on to create the shot. The second approach (repairs) already leaves more space for inspiration and reconsidering, bringing a subject into being that only exists inwardly – the last is almost unlimited, sort of communicating with a device that immensely influences the creative process, I enjoy it as much as a good conversation with a treasured friend.
“So one ends up being a virtist (whoever I stole that term from please forgive me, it’s just perfect) creating virtual art in a virtual world.”
Hurray for the virtists!
All images copyright Duraya
See all of Cajsa's Choices here. Follow Cajsa on Flickr, on Twitter, on her blog, and on her Ko-Fi.
Suggest Flick images and Flickr feeds to Cajsa Lilliehook! Tag your picture with #CasjaNWN -- or tag Cajsa Lilliehook on Flickr by adding her to the photo.
Cajsa’s Choices is devoted to unique, artistic, and innovative virtual world-based images and screenshots that showcase the medium as an art form and Second Life as a creative platform. (Generally not images that fit on this Bingo card.)
Cajsa Lilliehook is a sixteen year resident of Second Life, where she owned a photo studio, spent several years as a DJ at The Velvet, and for her first SL job, cleaned up prim trash. She co-founded and runs the It’s Only Fashion blog with her best friend Gidge Uriza. She also has a book review blog, Tonstant Weader Reviews and a cooking blog, Single Serving Recipes. She spends a lot of time researching and reporting on Republican sexual predators. In her first life, she ia retired grassroots leader who has worked for economic and social justice issues most of her life. She is also the minion of a cat named Nora.
Comments