Futurist and Yoshi's Island references aside…

I'm really getting into this content creation thing. A few dayz ago, I said I'd make a shirt. And so I have. What I did was use the Linden-provided templates—altho Resis should really check out this wealth of resources—and import them into Painter, which is splendid with my Wacom Intuos3. Started sketching as I normally would, which was easy.

I wasn't going for "photorealism", just something me, sorta tiedye hippydippy with my favorite colors and their intermediaries, yellow and blue. Played with various brush and stroke techniques to get the depth and shadowing you see, and tried to get the seams right too by pencilling out the edges fo' sum extra consistency.

Then came the hard part. I couldn't get the alpha layer to show right as a 32-bit TGA, and altho I've given the advice many times, "If you want a transparent graphic in SL, upload it as a 32-bit TGA", I've seldom created one like this. So I read the included Using_the_SL_Fashion_Design_Templates.pdf carefully and looked at all the layers. I eventually realized I had to do something for a cheap-'n'-dirty alpha layer like in the past, which is: select everything from my main graphics layer, paste it into the alpha, inverse it (since white = solid), and then cranked brightness and contrast to get the right balance. A simple blur to soften the edges, and these are by no means advanced graphics techniques, but what I've experimented with to get the job done.

Uploaded it into Second Life, threw off the default purple shirt, and then played around with the shirt params to make it fit better on this stock avatar (since clothes like this don't exactly fit on Torses):

And what's on the back, you may ask? Hehe… you'll have to see for yourself. Either ask me inworld for a copy of the shirt—FULL PERMISSIONS!—or download the completed .TGA, "Torley's 1st Shirt", courtesy of Ourmedia.

In summary, my experiences: