Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Madoka Kawabata;s “Staring at the Sea” thrills me for several reasons. The first is how her flat lighting, placid sea, and symmetry remind me of the artist René Magritte. Certainly, this is not a surreal picture, but this is one of those if you see it, you see it, and if you don’t, you don’t, situations. The second reason is she provides SLurls so you, too, can stand on a dock.
The third reason I love this is she counters it with a similar picture she produced with Midjourney:
This is one of the more interesting ways I have seen people in Second Life employ generative AI picture-making. It might be fun to describe an SL photo and see what AI produces. I would like that better than the current trend of people who have done such great work in Second Life abandoning it for doing all AI. After a while, I just quit following since my focus is SL.
For more of Madoka’s great pics, click here:
This is a picture of a new build by Cica Ghost who constantly surprises me with her creativity.
Madoka’s “Lost in a Forest” is hauntingly lonely, at least to me. I suppose it’s the gray of it all and how our culture associates black and gray with death and dying. This is not true of all cultures, some associate black with health, wealth, fertility, and other positive qualities. In fact, in some cultures, white is the color associated with death. (This reminds me that Martin Luther King spoke about how our language reinforces racism, the reason I stopped using “black and white” as metaphors about 30 years ago and even after all this time, I still have to think about it.)
“The End of a Wild Party” is my favorite among her recent pictures. I love her composition with the camera view place the sign and the table cattywampus, at an oblique angle. I like how it’s all in darkness except for what it lit up, the neon sign and the table where you can make out Madoka staring at her glass. This picture is artfully composed and duotone makes it even more dramatic still.
Madoka Kawabata continues to produce fabulous photos of her travels in Second Life and always provides a SLURL. I wrote about her a couple of years ago and I am thrilled that she keeps on traveling, blazing a trail across the metaverse and sending us tickets to ride.
All images copyright Madoka Kawabata
See all of Cajsa's Choices here. Follow Cajsa on Flickr, on Twitter, on her blog, and on her Ko-Fi.
Want to recommend amazing SL artists for future posts? Posts links to their image feeds in comments here. (Self-promotion welcome!)
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 seventeen 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 is a 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.
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