New World Notes

Stunning Second Life Landscape Photos Blending Virtual Nature & Civilization

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Is it life or is it Second Life? More and more I wonder. Denny Cioc’s picture “Junction” makes it impossible to tell. Doesn’t it feel like a place you have seen sometimes in your life? Denny has a great eye for landscapes. 

For more unique perspectives on landscapes, click here:

New Second Life Sim Inspired by China's "Red Beach" is So Amazing, There's a Large Flickr Group Devoted to Photographing It

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Panjin is the first picture in a new Flickr group devoted to pictures taken at a brand new sim of the same name by Jade Koltai, a name familiar to sim connoisseurs. She is a long-time sim designer, working on her own and in collaboration with the late Serene Footman. Panjin has the same spare restraint that makes her work so appealing to Second Life photographers. I love how she uses the foreground to frame the piers in the background.

I love that there are so few colors, yet it is vibrating with color. It is based on the real life Panjin ("Red Beach") in China. The red flower is Suaeda salsa, a member of the Amaranth family.

For more Panjin, click here:

Fashion Friday Finds from SL Style Blog Yurin's Happy Sigh

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Yurin has a lovely blog called Happy Sigh. Her most recent post 230313 features the ubiquitous fashion passion for mesh. If you checked out the Oscar and Vanity Fair After Party fashions, mesh and illusion was everywhere with over ever shrinking strategic coverage. This is downright modest by comparison. 

• TOP + *COCO*_FishnetTopWithBra(Black) @FaMESHed which closes March 27th

For more Happy Sighing, click here:

Amazing Flickr Group Devoted to Taking Screenshots Looking Up from Second Life's Virtual Water Bodies! Here's Some Beautifully Abstract Examples

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

I am a fan of Second Life-themed Flickr groups. They reveal obsessions and nothing gets the creative juices flowing like an obsession. 

One particularly surprising and beautifully maintained group collects underwater pictures, not pictures of folks swimming around underwater, but pictures shot upward toward the non-watery world, the dry world filtered through the lens of the water. Could there be a more intriguing obsession? 

Check it out: Second Life - Underwater Looking Up. This picture above from Cat Mistwalker is extraordinary. The water makes everything abstract,  but this allows us to see the abstraction and imagine what it is, though. 

For more pics shot from underwater, click here:

Awesome Second Life Avatar Cosplay Tributes to Legendary Authors Sylvia Plath, Karen Blixen, and Virginia Woolf

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Cecilia Nansen has created a special photo album offering her photographic tributes to her favorite authors and a favorite photographer. I didn’t need her description to recognize the iconic features of Virginia Woolf. She even captures how Woolf seemed to be looking inward, interrogating herself as well as the world around her. Click here to compare with the IRL photo.

For more amazing avatar author tributes, click here:

Friday Fashion & Shopping Tips from SL Blogger Tomomi Homewood

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Tomomi Homewood is my favorite kind of fashion blogger. She wears clothes. She is a microblogger and does not provide links in her Flickr descriptions, but the sheer joy of seeing clothing instead of lingerie  is worth the extra effort of looking for SLURLs and links. It’s March which means it’s The Arcade month. That’s where you will find these overalls. 

☑ [SHIFUKU] Overall look - - - - @The ARCADE

- Overalls Set BOM only / Legacy RARE

- Shoulder Jacket no rig / Legacy

- Tank top / Legacy

- Overalls / Legacy

[To take the A Train to The Arcade, click here]

For a sweet treat, click here:

Story of a Sad Little Robot Told in Words & Whimsically Beautiful SL Images

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Meet SLLR, the Sad, Lonely, Little Robot. This is Chiara Baroni’s project featuring a little robot and its adventures in Second Life. You can find the pictures in her SLLR album. Her description begins the story: 

It had been weeks since The Wind. Three weeks, six days, 15 hours and 38 minutes, to be exact. The gust of radiation and toxins swept by in less than a second. But it disintegrated every single living thing. Instantly.

The robot, designed to serve the humans in various analytical, physical and strategic capacities, just sat there. For those weeks, days and hours. Waiting for, some sort of, instruction, or, command. Some sign of life. Or, purpose.

But even the crudely sentient program within him, could figure out—eventually—none of that was going to happen. He powered up his servos, and crept out from the makeshift elevated bunker, to scan the landscape. “Nothing.” . . . He thought to himself.

For more of the robot’s story, click here:

Sumptuous SL Roleplay Pics Inspired by Avatar: Way of Water & Beyond

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Mavis Tinúviel’s “The Phoenix” is a great example of how she puts as much effort into her background setting as she does into styling the avatar. I love the fiery strands hanging down in this picture that seems ablaze with heat.

Years ago, a former SL resident used to criticize pictures, asking WTF? One of her peeves was pictures where the outfit and the background were the same color.

Pictures like this show how wrong she was. Yes, contrast does make it easier to see details and sometimes complementary colors create a dynamic interplay, but this picture would not be so striking nor so powerful if the background were not as fiery as the subjects. 

For more pictures with a similar style, click here:

Today's Flickr Pick: Ms. Moonwall Makes Amazing SL Action Pics

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Eripom Moonwall is a weapons manufacturer which would make her a bad guy in real life, but in Second Life, nah. She’s one of the good guys and not just because I love her dynamic action-filled photos that seem like stills from a movie. That’s just the whipped cream and cherry on top of the Eripom sundae. She also led the development of Mitsumi Town as reported here and Rieri, a town on her own store sim as reported here.

Moonwall makes movies and pictures with her friends and is always highlighting and amplifying the work of other people. In other words, a generous and open-hearted resident. I also like that most of the time, the protagonists are, women with guns, to be sure, but there is a feminist element to her action shots. 

For more action shots, click here:

Second Life Bird Photography is So Popular There's a Whole Flickr Group for It! Here's Some Favorites

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Yesterday’s post sent me off to Second Life Avians, a Flickr group devoted to our feathered friends. This was the first picture and what a picture. Taken by Susann DeCuir it is vibrant and colorful. Her description links to more information and a SLURL. [To teleport to sim, click here] I love that she shot this from above so you don’t just see the birds, but you see them as a swath of color over the landscape, almost like flowers. 

For more amazing birds, click here: