VReam Image - VReam Art

The Future is Bright

15 May 2022May 15, 2022

Despite our differences,
Experience and expectations are the foundation of our friendship.
You yearn to be wild and free
I am content to be me.

Following alternate branches,
We’ve taken different turns and found new friends but when it comes down to it
The things that excite and drive you
secretly appeal to me too.

=========

It seems like ages ago since Christi and I first toyed with the idea of working together as a team and calling ourselves VReam Art. Honestly, neither of us really knew where the effort would go but it sounded like fun and a great way to grow our skills together.

And so it was for over a year. Somewhere along the way things slipped away. The whole writing while creating images to illustrate the story experience left me doubting myself and wanting to start over. While I struggled for direction, Christi opted to not wait around and got involved in her own things. I can’t blame her.

When Noel came back into my life a year ago and brought her infectious desire to create videos, I too went into a different direction. It was when Christi and I were discussing her own videos that I suggested the three of us collaborate more. Christi and Noel had already done some ‘mermaid’ images together in addition to borrowing her body in Noel’s “Elephant In The Room” image.

All three of us have several projects going on at the same time but Christi was excited about doing more with me. Since my Flickr page had become more of a personal page we opted to jointly contribute to a Deviant Art page that I had created at about the same time but never did much with it. That the page was there and Flickr’s recent changes made Deviant Art the seemingly obvious choice.

Stop by and say ‘hi’!

VReam Art at Deviant Art

Windmills Of Your Mind

23 July 2021July 24, 2021

It has been some time since I created anything I felt worthy of adding here. I have been busy but simply not doing anything that I felt anybody would bother to read about. Then came Noel. When I first read of the photo contest being run by Focus Magazine, I felt I should participate but then found reasons not to…there are just so many other things I am working on. One more thing on the list was the last thing I needed. However, Noel’s enthusiasm is contagious.

She immediately came up with the popular tune, “Windmills on your mind” which is filled with images and suggested we collaborate on it. How could I pass up the opportunity? We traveled to several sims looking for the ‘right’ windmill then Noel spent even more looking for the best objects that are mentioned in the tune. After taking the time to locate them, she took lots of photos of these in various lighting conditions and presented them to me.

In all of her hard work, I somehow got off track and mentioned visiting the beautiful Cammino & Vivo Capovolto, knowing that she would be amazed by the things she would see there. As expected, she was (and has many more photos to prove it). While admiring the art there, we discussed poses we might use for this photo. I pointed to a specific sculpture thinking it would be “perfect”. She agreed. At that moment, neither of us knew what a challenge it would be for me to re-create that pose and so that we could become that sculpture.

True to form. after several days of me creating this image, I found myself editing things that nobody would likely notice and she started feeling that I had put so much time into it that it had become ‘mine’, was no longer a collaboration, and that she would contribute the photo she had already begun working on before this one emerged from our discussions.

Though she is very much the inspiration and responsible for this image, I appreciate that she wanted to create something that she had more control of. The fact is that this image would not exist without her.

“Windmills Of Your Mind”
(originally by Noel Harrison)

Round, like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever spinning reel

Like a snowball down a mountain
Or a carnival balloon
Like a carousel that’s turning
Running rings around the moon

Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on it’s face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space

Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Like a tunnel that you follow
To a tunnel of it’s own
Down a hollow to a cavern
Where the sun has never shone

Like a door that keeps revolving
In a half forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble
Someone tosses in a stream

Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on it’s face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space

Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Keys that jingle in your pocket
Words that jangle in your head
Why did summer go so quickly
Was it something that you said?

Lovers walking along the shore
Leave their footprints in the sand
Was the sound of distant drumming
Just the fingers of your hand?

Pictures hanging in a hallway
And a fragment of this song
Half remembered names and faces
But to whom do they belong?

When you knew that it was over
Were you suddenly aware
That the autumn leaves were turning
To the color of her hair

Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever spinning reel

As the images unwind
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Pictures hanging in a hallway
And the fragment of this song
Half remembered names and faces
But to whom do they belong

When you knew that it was over
Were you suddenly aware
That the autumn leaves were turning
To the color of her hair

Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever spinning reel

As the images unwind
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Peaceful Morning

29 April 2020April 29, 2020

Luane’s world presents so many photo opportunities that I am certain you will see more. This image is barely a composite…barely.

It also marks a small departure. As I’ve become more comfortable using the Black Dragon viewer, I’m becoming more reliant on it’s abilities – especially the poser. The down side is that when using the BD poser, the actual image is visible only to the person running the viewer. This means that this image wasn’t actually taken by me but by Christi since she is the only person in the photo.

I completed the post processing – small fixes for the most part with the single most time-consuming portion being the addition of the ground fog. For the most part, she gets credit for the composition and light.

With that I should point out that was no easy feat. She actually took her first image for this setting a week ago. However, once back in the shop it was obvious that her face just wasn’t right. This round of images was the introduction of my character named Louise and I didn’t want to repeat the same mistake as the very first image of Louise..which did not fit the character I had in mind.

So, after the first round of images, a new head and painful searching for a skin (of which I am still not satisfied with), she returned only to find that it wasn’t possible to return to the same exact pose and angle because the horse in the foreground had moved!

So, rather than a frontal shot of Louise in which I had wanted to reveal some of her attributes, we settled for this side shot.

Still, I am happy with what she brought back.

To finish this, I set the image to some music that I hoped would reinforce the peaceful silence of a misty ground fog as the heat of the sun touched the wet grass on a cool spring morning.

A Night Out

21 April 2020April 21, 2020

The last couple of weeks have kept me busy chasing down free heads and bodies that have come available in SL during this period of global lockup. Collecting freebies was the easy part. Trying to decide on what skin to use on them was more difficult – especially since I now have more heads than I expect to need to illustrate my story.

So, when the weekend was nearly over, it was time to relax and it seemed that Kyashi had been locked up for a while – even her last trip out of the closet was a working one. The result was that she took off and had a great evening listening to music and dancing her feet off.

Not all was play, though – she did stop to allow me this one photograph as she was leaving Taox Tattoo…

This image was another exercise in Black Dragon. I think I’m slowly getting a handle on it which is somewhat ironic because this week I also decided to start uploading poses that I have created to my marketplace store. The problem being that Black Dragon eliminates the need to create poses in world and unfortunately, is not able to export the poses you create in browser.

Back to the image, though. There were two glaring issues I noticed while taking the photographs. The first was that while using depth of field to blur the background – the viewer did not initially blur what was behind the windshield. As I considered how I was going to address that, I found there was an option to leave alpha channels out of DOF consideration. Great! That eliminated that problem.

When I toggled that option, I noticed that something changed around Kyashi’s head. I toggled it a couple more times and saw that there was alpha in the edges of her hair and it was causing problems I hadn’t noticed. Unfortunately, no matte which way it was toggled, there was still a problem. I opted to turn the alphas off and tend to the blurry hair in photoshop because it seemed that would be less noticeable and easier to fix.

I’m sure the second issue is also related to the alpha channel. Kyashi’s dress is full of alpha and it was playing havoc with the shadows being cast on it. The shadow was so dark that it was nearly black. Additionally, the shadow edges were sharp and jagged but that has always been an issue for me with Black Dragon.

I ended up using the stamp/clone tool in photoshop to soften the shadow edges and a curves/blend-if solution to reduce the super dark shadows on the dress to something more reasonable if not still a bit on the dark side.

In closing, I’ll praise Black Dragon for it’s poser. Actually setting poses without twisting something into a pretzel – especially fingers – is a challenge. The flexibility is just so awesome that I’m sure I will keep working at it long enough to get the knack of it.

Finally, I used this image in the following video – Are you coming back…

Spring Is In The Air

15 April 2020April 15, 2020

I’d like to say that the three sims I saw on the map were some of the most beautifully put together that I have seen…except I can’t. I can’t say that because I never made it to the third sim. Instead, upon stumbling across a patch of tall giving birth to multitudes of flowers which were busily serviced by as many butterflies, I knew this was the place to take a photograph.

I’m still struggling with the Black Dragon viewer but should have caught that Noel’s face was a bit brighter than I wanted it. I suppose i was too busy trying to catch more butterflies in the image as they flew into and out of the view. Unfortunately, I feel I failed at both and perhaps the over exposed face wasn’t a bad thing but simply a reflection of the strong sun that day.

Yes, the dandelion and it’s seeds were added in post processing.

To complete this image, I had searched and found, I feel, a perfect piece of music to accompany this photo so I was intent in publishing a video with it. After struggling to get the encoders to work because Serif has stopped supporting my video editor, I finally got it in place. Hope you enjoy.

Secondlife Location: Luane’s World

Heart to Heart

29 March 2020April 10, 2020

This image was intended to be the introduction of Louise, one of the characters from the story I am working on in the background. She is wearing a Genesis Head in this image which, in full light, doesn’t look bad but I simply could not get it to look like the image of Louise in my head. The bone structure – especially in the nose – was just not working for me.

However, I hadn’t yet come to that conclusion when I took this shot. The heartfelt moment between the horse and Louise was sincere and since we can’t really see her face, we’ll leave it at that for now.

This image was created in the Black Dragon viewer but I still haven’t managed to grasp full control of the ability to blur the background in Black Dragon so it was done as a composite – derendering the closest horse and pulling Louise out of view to photograph the background. Tone and color adjustments, as well as highlights were completed in photoshop.

Image born in SecondLife at Dya’s Abandoned Vacation spot

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