Secret Santa to Aelia

[aquilegia]

aeliaa was my SS giftee this year, and since she opted to share and it's past the holidays, it's time to put an easier-to-find link out. :)

I made a few sets:



'Deco', various prints by Erté (3 suites -- Princesses, Precious Stones, and 20s Revisited) and George Barbier on Civil Idol, Lady on Red, Grilled Cheese, and Surfing the Universe. Goes great with Graverobber's add-ons!



'Endless Dream' eyeshadows -- these won't obscure the shape of your sims' eyelids, so no sudden double eyelid on monolidded sims, or narrow eyelids on heavylidded sims. Textures are a blend of Enayla's Warmth skin, SimpleLife's monolid eyemask, and a touch of RenSim's Zine shadow. Alpha is a blend of SimpleLife's eyeshadow alpha and RenSim's Zine, with additional editing by me.







'Flower Faery', two floral-themed skintones on the Pennies base.



'Mauritania', retextured and Pooklet'd Mauritania doors + stained glass textures for the glass panel. The stained glass IS transparent, minus the leading which I made sure is not; transparencies vary depending on the type of glass in the designs, like real stained glass. Goes great with Leesester's Mauritania add-ons.

There are plenty more swatches in the zip. Download at Box.net.

Comments

[lalabubus]

Lovely prints.
I don't play with supernatural...anything, but that skin preview make me want to try. Thank you.

[eefje00704]

I'm sorry for my directness, but I wanted to ask you something about your Flower Faery skintones. I read on GoS that you are planning to make more of them, and I was just wondering if you might be including any soft blues and/or greens? You see, I use Hat's Stolen by Faeries Multi PT mod, but I don't like the skintones very much. They're not bad per se, but I'm not crazy about Mouseyblue's originals either. I've been looking for the perfect skintones for my faeries to replace them with, and basically, yours in some different extra tones would be. Perfect that is.

[aquilegia]

I'm happy to consider suggestions. :) I wasn't considering a blue, since Morning Glory does it for me, but I have been poking at a green. The other colors are still up in the air, though, so another blue isn't out of the question. Do you have any pictures or swatches close in color to what you'd like to see?

(Just watch, I'll go crazy with this and it'll end up being eight more skins, not five...)

[aquilegia]

(And by five I mean three, of course. *cough*)

[eefje00704]

Well, I certainly wouldn't mind eight more skins ...

Either way, thanks very much for considering suggestions :) Are hexadecimal values ok too?

For blue, I was thinking a powdery blue. Something like #7e9d9d, and if you were up to doing more than one blue, a dark one like #5c6f6f.

For green, I was thinking of something like anise green, something like #bdd98f, but you're super at colours, so I'll probably love whatever green it is you're working on.

[aquilegia]

Hex values are fine, thanks! I'll see what I can do with those. :) I REALLY like that green...

[eefje00704]

Haha, good, maybe we'll have two greens to look forward to then!

Ooh, do you know what would also look gorgeous? If you used evening rose's accent colour (the pink on the belly and breasts) as a base colour in combination with morning glory's accent colour as the accent colour. Eh, I hope that made sense. (Also, greedy, moi? Yes, totally :P)

[aquilegia]

You're offering helpful suggestions! ;) I'll give that a try, as the delicate pinkish one I'd made a while ago I just looked at and went, "... Eeeeh."

I also just got a fabulous idea for a tigerlilly colored skin (complete with freckles for the spots) but it remains to be seen if I can pull it off.

[eefje00704]

Sounds interesting, but is it yellow or orange tigerlilly?

[aquilegia]

Orange (with shading into yellow), because it's one of my favorite colors. :D Depends on how it looks shading into a human skintone, though.

The two pinks didn't work out so well. :/ The darker pink is much darker than the other and my tries at it looked blotchy and weird. If I use those two colors together the results are going to be between those two shades.

My first try at the green turned out nicely, though. I'm going to play with the skin I'm using for the undertone a bit more and see what I come up with.

[eefje00704]

Sounds interesting, the orange.

Too bad about the pinks. I hope you can get some kind of lighter pink worked out though, it would be so pretty :)

Yay, green! I can't wait to see what it looks like.

[eefje00704]

Hey Aquilegia,

Sorry to bother you, but I just wanted to ask you if you were still planning to do these skintones?

[aquilegia]

I do still have plans, they're just kind of hanging in limbo at the moment. What's on your mind?

[eefje00704]

The multi-pt set I was hoping to make. ;) See, what I wanted to do was give each pt a differently coloured skintone from the set, so that they have matching skins, but in different shades. And I don't want to start up my new neighbourhood without my own PT set, which I don't want to make without the skins. Well, you get it, I guess.

I'd considered trying to recolour the skins myself, but I won't if you're still going to do it. I've never done anything with skintones (or anything you have to use bodyshop for, for that matter), so I'd most likely fail horribly. I just wanted to know I wasn't waiting for something that would never happen, because that would have been pretty silly.

[aquilegia]

Oh, understandable. :) Well, let's see... you'd need four skins, correct? I know I can manage two more -- the green tone you suggested and one other, depending on how well I can get the colors to work (I'm going to give the pink one another go). Would that work?

[eefje00704]

Well I'm going to do an 8 PT mod, so the closer to 8 the better of course, but I'll take any I can get ;) Anything you're willing to do would work.

I might even be able to get to blue from the green one without too much pixellation or strange effects, and I can try to lighten or darken some of the others for a bit of variety, to get to eight.* Unless you feel like explaining how to do the two tone effect or uploading your psd or something?

*Theoretically, anyway, since I've never done any skintones.

[aquilegia]

I'll see what I can do over the next few days and get back to you. I don't think I'll manage another 6 colors (although you never know, I banged together a set of 8 normal skins in a day a little while ago), but I'll try to make a couple this week at least while I have Photoshop fired up to make octopus skins.

I can also give you my psds if I don't manage 6 skins. They might be a bit of a pain to decipher since I tend to kludge things together, but it'd make doing other colors easier since you'd have my layer masks and adjustment layers as guides.

If you don't hear back from me by Thursday or Friday give me a prod, because I am a total scatterbrain who would forget their own head if it weren't fastened on. :)

[eefje00704]

Well if you don't mind sharing your psd's, I'd love to have them either way. I think these skins deserve to be made in a whole bunch of different colours.

[aquilegia]

Oh, I don't mind at all! :D The more knowledge shared, the more awesome things for everyone, as far as I'm concerned. I'll clean them up a bit and give those to you as well.

[eefje00704]

Excellent :D Thank you!

[eefje00704]

*prods Aquilegia*

I forgot about it before the weekend.

[aquilegia]

Ah -- thanks for reminding me.

Here are the PSDs. They're currently set up for a green skin. I played around with them some last week but I'm too low on creativity/energy still.

[eefje00704]

Thanks so much! I'll try it out soon. I had a quick look just now and it sure looks complicated!

[eefje00704]

Hi, I just wanted to let you know I finally gave these a try today. This is what I have so far:

http://img864.imageshack.us/img864/7011/facesc.png

http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/7289/bodies.png

[aquilegia]

Those are REALLY pretty! Wow, you're doing a great job! :D

[eefje00704]

Thanks! Yeah it looked good in PS, but now of course I get this neck seam that's barely visible but too visible to leave it and I can't seem to get rid of it. That and I'll have to do something about how the face texture blends in to the scalp, because right now, it doesn't.

[aquilegia]

There are layers in the PSD that are a flat floodfill with a layer mask -- one is over the neck, one is around the face. Fill those all with the same color as the scalp and everything should match up.

[eefje00704]

Yeah, that's what I did, but I guess I did it wrong the first time. I tried again, and now the neck line is gone.

[aquilegia]

That happens to me too sometimes! I don't know if it's because sometimes the opacity of my bucket fill gets set to something less than 100% (I don't know HOW I do that but it happens), or what. I'm glad it's working for you now!

[aureliacnidaria.livejournal.com]

Yesterday or so I downloaded at GOS your SS gift to Aelia, very intrigued by the opalescent items as I'm a sucker for opalescence/iridescence myself. Right now I'm with Bodyshop open checking out a batch of recent downloads and let me say I'm amazed with both your eyeshadows and skintones. They're so delicate yet so detailed, very well-done!

I'm VERY new to Sims 2 and thanks to AlfredAskew I've found GOS soon(which custom content quality is far superior than MTS and TSR stuff)and have known the work of amazing creators: AlfredAskew, Mouseyblue, Amaryll, Pooklet, Pyxis, Yuxi, Nabila and now you.

Right now my internet is super-slow, but as soon as it gets faster again, I'm totally downloading more of your skintones. They're so human-like, so natural, and I'm in love with the rich colours and all the variety. I can't wait to have them all in my game.

If you are still accepting suggestions for unnatural skins, I'd suggest something like a drow skintone, such as HystericalParoxysm's "Raven" from her "Idolatry Beyond" set. I don't play drows myself but I think it would be great for aliens.

Anyway, thank you very much for such great custom content!:-D

[aquilegia]

Why thank you! I hope you like them in-game as much as in Bodyshop. :)

I'm not sure if I'll ever do a licorice black skintone as I don't really have a use for one, but if I can figure out how I'll do an opalescent one. I'm not sure if I've got the skills to figure out how to make it work, but I'll sure try! X)