Otherworldly

When I reviewed Astrali for the Skin Fair (which goes on for just a few days more!), I noted that there was also an in-store release at The Plastik, featuring a massive number of tones, including a wide variety of fantasy tones. I decided to play around with one of these tones for this photo and together with the armour from Bare Rose, we ended up with a lovely desert creature seducing an unsuspecting knight. The photo also uses the Nanda hair from Mina, available at this month’s We Love Role-Play, and the Jewelled Dragon’s Egg Necklace from Maxi Gossamer.

We’ve already gushed quite a bit about the armour from Bare Rose, but just look at the materials on it. Here it is in the unmodified black version.

You can also see the use of materials on the necklace, which adds so much realism and sparkle to jewels. Maxi Gossamer is definitely at the forefront of jewellery with materials on and I am loving it.

A less expected use of materials is perhaps a hair, but I wanted to try out Mina’s after I found out that she has applied materials to her latest releases. In this sort of setting it does get a bit glossy for realism, but we found other settings where it looked very good (they just weren’t right for this photo). I think it will take a while for both designers and photographers (at least, we feel it will take us some time) to get a hang of how to best use and show off materials when they are used on something that isn’t a metal or a jewel. It is quite easy to get too much of a shine, even if the latest version of Firestorm seems better at it than the previous.

In any case, I do hope to see more hair makers experimenting with it as I feel it can add quite a bit of depth and realism. Mina’s hairs do include versions without materials as well, so that is excellent for when you can’t quite get the settings right. I must also say I really like this style and I will be keeping a close eye on her future releases.

Finally, back to the skin that started the photo. This is the Eridanus tone of Astrali, worn with glossy lips and heavy eyeshadow. There’s such a huge variety of colours in the fantasy range—and of shades of each colour—that I can’t imagine not finding just the right skin if you’re putting together a fantasy look. And all of them, even the very light and the very dark ones, preserve the details of the skin very well. There’s also appliers for all tones, including for matching nails to the skin colour, so you have no need to worry about not being able to fit your exotic tone to your mesh body parts.