For the pre-show bloggers and press at the Home and Garden Expo!

It’s almost time for the Home Expo 2012.  It’s been a roller coaster ride again but I love it! Below are a few snapshots from the planning, the failures, the heart stopping moment and the final moment of finishing!

This was my first design for the Home and Garden Expo 2012, I am not a builder as such, I build because I like to texture and being part of the What Next Sim is amazingly awesome and at the same time a little scary, with talented designers such as Thistle Homes, Sway and Funky Junk as my neighbour (to name just a few) I thought I had better start early on sketching out a few ideas!

Note to self: when making things for a display check the sizes and then double check the size again! This build fits perfectly but it is the wrong orientation!!! The plot is 30m wide and 60m long NOT 60m wide and 30m long!

A bit of  tweaking later, coupled with a few swear words at myself I get it right the second time round :)

I wanted an open free moving environment but with nooks and cranny’s and lots of windows so I could hang up a billion curtain fabric displays!

There are two entrances, the reception room, where if it didn’t break copyright laws I would fill with design books and magazines!

The other room is our little gallery of textures with a small room for coats and an under the stairs nook hiding a few boxes of memories!  See the wall map – that’s something taken from an idea for our rl studio so I can at least dream of traveling the world!

The stairs lead up to a small grass filled deck to catch the last of the sun!

But one of my favourite parts is the studio.  I tired to pick out as many bits from my rl dream studio as I could fit in, a large work table, fabrics galore, tailors dummy and things that I love and inspire me (should have added my computer and wacom somewhere as they are my no 1 for what would you save if the house was on fire! ;)

There are key trends and themes from this year throughout the studio, have a bit of wanderlust then head over to the back of the studio for Aztec inspired fabric and fur textures or peek at the upcycle area for those that like to recycle with style!

In the picture below I get to work and look at Funky Junks beautiful home and live in a street with great designer neighbours!!!

It’s been fun, even through the near heart failure when I finished the whole build and had placed everything inside just perfect, took it into my inventory ready to nip over to the home and garden expo, only to find that it had disappeared!!!!

The keep calm and carry on motto appeared in my head, so as I headed to make a cuppa, restart Second Life a few times and sometimes magic happens…..back in the inventory :)

I’m off to make press release and blogger packs but keep an eye out tomorrow for a sneak peek at some of our brand new releases for the Expo (all of the money goes to charity).  Can’t wait….we released a crafty early look at one of our packs on our facebook page :)

Special credit to What Next for including us on there Home Expo sim, Pitsch Parx from UrbanizeD  and Vitrail Illios from New Trails for the fantastic landscaping.

Hope to see you there!

Whilst working on some patterns recently for iphone and laptop skins with a native American vibe, I thought it would be cool to rework a few ideas for an Aztec inspired texture collection.

Hand drawn patterns painted on canvas give the Summer Tribe textures a real artisan feel, in co ordinating colours and patterns, seamless (tip: play around with the scale to have large, statement prints or small scale repeat patterns) and the “ready to go” shaded set.

Drop by Insight Designs or shop online to grab a set of great textures!  We have everything from seamless wood and bricks to exclusive designed realistic fabric textures and wallpaper.  You can also catch up with us on our Facebook page and twitter :)

Undecorated Curiosity. Where decadence and glamour give way to decay and nostalgia.

Below you can find 2 free sample textures from the fantastic “Undecorated Curiosity Texture Pack” or click the link to visit Shop.insightdesigns.

And don’t forget to keep up to date with all our textures on our Facebook Page or join us on Twitter :)

As always our free texture grabs are free for personal and commercial use.

Have a great weekend!

Spruce up Your Space brings us April Showers this month and we have an exclusive, a seamless collection of raindrops, rainclouds and a cute rainbow fabric texture pack.

Available this weekend at Insight Designs for less than $1! Don’t miss it :)

If you love home and decor check out the rest of the Spruce Up Your Space designers over at their flickr group, it’s a cracker this month!

Good morning.  It’s a bit grey outside today (perfect light for taking texture photos) so before I head out I want to thank Liz Ruest for posting her amazing images in our Flickr Group Texture Recipes and for sharing the way she created them. It’s always great to find fantastic textures but it’s also great to discover a little bit from behind the scenes.

Liz takes her texture recipes seriously and with great flair, colour and imagination. I love all the contrasts and details in the textures.

This one of my favourites built up from batik fabric, stone bricks, trees, leaves and moss between stones using various blend modes!

Visit Liz Ruest and her texture recipes over at Flick and take a peek at her blog for more insights into textures (Layers Of textures with threshold masks is one I will be checking out!)

If you have great textures and ideas to share, or questions on using textures, jump over to Texture Recipes. We’d love to see you there! :)

All images courtesy of Liz Ruest.

Ombre Plaster Textures – shaded and graduated in tones, a beautiful color effect where the color gradually changes from light to dark.  Our seamless Plaster Ombre Textures look great on walls, ceramic objects, pots and the shaded textures add an extra depth to your builds and look fantastic on sculpts and 3D modeling.

Available from Shop.InsightDesigns

Or stop by Insight designs Studio.

Keep an eye out for our Ombre Fabric Textures in Mocha, Graphite and forest green, for all our news and updates join us over at Facebook.

A great and quick way to add a fresh look to your photos, check out the before and after below and then catch the walk through and if you use a texture or two in your final image please add it to the flickr group Texture Recipes, a new group for sharing all texture ideas and treatments. :)

Open up your image in photoshop and crop, adjust if necessary,

Don’t worry about the colour fill layer in the image above its just to show how I cropped my image to focus on the items in the shot.

When you are happy with your image, duplicate the layer  (right click on the layer and click duplicate or drag your original layer to the new layer icon,

Next to add a subtle light source from the window by adding a  create a gradient layer,

In the layer palette click on the icon marked no.1 in the image above and click gradient. Another box will open, select a grey to transparent gradient and set the layer to divide 9% (try other layer modes such as lighten, each works slightly differently according to the background)

Next for a border, one of many ways – using the rectangular marquee too draw a rectangle around the edges, inverse the selection,(shift+ctrl+I) and on a new layer either create a colour layer or using the paintbucket fill the layer with white. Blur between 5 and 10%.

Now to make the image sing a little more! Here I  used a texture from our Sometimes I dream texture pack called Subtle Hint.

I placed this above the other layers and duplicated it, the bottom texture (no 1.) is set to divide 100% and the duplicated layer on the top (no.2) is set to overlay 50%

Above you can see the layer order with finally a logo grouped layer so I can easily move around our logo to fit any where on the image.

This technique and textures work great on other images to :

flickr group Texture Recipes

Happy Easter!

I was asked a couple of questions the other day, one was where do you get your inspiration from (I’ll talk more about that in an upcoming article – very exciting news) and in answering that I thought it might be kinda interesting to show you my work flow process from initial inspiration to final product, in this case my final product is going to be a photo  to show different ways of using our textures but it could have easily been either a  decorative egg cup planter  for Easter or a full permission sculpted egg pack with textures.

My inspiration came from Martha Stewards egg flower vases spotted over at STYLIZMO.  It’s absolutely beautiful idea, I love the slightly coloured egg shells and the spring flower bouquets.

Working along the same idea of egg shell vases I wanted to create a similar design but with insight designs unique style and textures so its time to start creating an egg cup and egg in a 3d program to export to secondlife.

If you don’t have access to programs such as Maya or can’t quite grasp Blender (a free modeling tool) take a look on the marketplace, there are some great sculpts available, ready made (note: if I was packaging this as a sculpted product then I would have baked the light and added shine to the egg cup)

Next I test the sculpts in second life, again if I had been making these as a final product to sell I would have completed all of the texturing and effects in Maya and Photoshop but as I like to experiment a lot with textures  I wanted to see if I could create  the ideas I had in my head like someone would who had purchased a premade sculpty pack.  This is a great way to add originality to brought sculpts by  adding different textures and seeing what works.  As you can see I wanted a bit more texture from my eggs than the original Martha Steward photo and I also wanted a more pottery handmade feel, like a found eggcup that had perhaps been left outside and was showing slight signs of age.

After trying several textures from our quite large range of plasters and weathered stucco I settled on two different packs.

1. The first one is a plain wall texture from faded dreams wall textures offset so the skirting and shading create added details around the rim and edges.

2. For the egg shell I used  different textures from the Mediterranean Breeze (stucco walls and plastered cement Textures) as well as being a great rustic egg shell texture with a slightly hand painted feel, by using the middle shadow of the texture  and offseting it to sit where the egg and egg cup meet it created a great realistic shading effect.

3. Experimenting a bit more with the Mediterranean Breeze textures on the egg cup, offsetting again  to give a variety of different looks!

close up:

If this was a final product then after all the texturing, building and boxing up comes the advertisement, again I took inspiration from the original photo and placed my egg cups in front of a window (one of the best bits about secondlife is the ability to make very quick sets and to adjust the daylight settings) Easy but very addictive!

A few shots later I ended up with a favourite:

Its a personal thing but I  highly recommend if you are creating an advertisement that you also include an image of your product without shadows (that does two things it shows how great your texturing is and that there is no misrepresenting of the product) or include a note to say that shadows were enabled and of course a real demo is the perfect solution.

The photo above is perfect for an ad,  just add all the info you need, such as logo, brand etc and you have a finished design from inspiration to a digital product!

For my purposes, of creating a photo  (my end product) I wanted to try to capture that light, chalky feel – spring like in essence.

So I opened up my sl snapshot in photoshop and with a few easy steps made the image pop a bit more, using a simple feathered border, gradient layer and our texture “Subtle Hint” from the fantastic Sometimes I dream Texture pack.  Be sure to check back tomorrow when I add the complete tutorial for boasting your images.

It’s been a fun day today working and  remember to keep adding your photos to our flick group – Second Life Interior Design.

Hope you all had a great Easter and I’ll be back tomorrow with the complete tutorial!

Textures and sculpts : Insight Designs (inworld)

Flowers : Arctic Greenhouse

Sometimes I Dream…….Soft grunge textures.

Size: 3600 x 3600 px (or 12.0″ x 12.0″)

Resolution: 300 ppi