Torley Textures IV: breaking the fourth wall-paper!

I find a well-worthy usage of my time on weekends is to create free textures. More than just the process of dabbling and soon publishing them, I love that in Second Life, I can share these packs, and see them applied to 3D creations. On occasion, I've stopped by sandboxes, to see "Charlie Watermelon" (guess why the name?) plastering the side of an incredibly colorful building (mea culpa… not!), while more "traditional" choices like "Stuccola" find their way snugly in domestic landscapes of the 21st century, and "Kainazzo" might as well be your great-uncle's long-lost marble print gone awry under the waves.

If you're not previously acquainted and this is leaving you in pausethought, that's because words are proving impotent. Lemme show ya Torley Textures IV… S.S.A. (Surreal, Seamless, Alive)!

This is Torley Textures IV, a collection of fifty (50). The first two:

• Torley Textures I - previous info
   
  
   
• Torley Textures II - also blogged about before
   
  

can be downloaded in lossless (.PNG) quality from my Flickr photostream as you please, or should you want to take the inworld route, head to Stillman and look for the colorful Torley Textures display:

Click it and you'll get a folder in your Inventory with 161 (50 + 60 + 50 + 1 Totally Transparent) textures. Remember, they're 512×512, and they seamlessly tile!

A few more words behind the images: as you may have noticed, my increasingly-broadening array of artistic inspirations is showing through. In Torley Textures IV, I've given a respectful tip-o'-the-watermelon-hat to glitch art aesthetics and visual noise that adds presence, not distraction, to a solid foundry of craftsmanship. Some of the finer details were derived from my practice with postprocessing Second Life snapshots as featured in "SL2086" and "qrn zub", and there's several which are actually variations on said themes.

Visualizing that growth as it comes alive on my blog, and witnessing a clear line of procedural descendancy enthralls me so.

While pushing towards watermelon colors at times, the gross majority aim towards other palettes and tones, moods and timbres. I strove to make this collection the most usable yet eclectic yet, and even if you don't want to Apply something directly, you're free to hack it up: scatter the bits and recombine it until a new form pleases you.

Just think about how bland the world would be without textures: be it textures on your walls, textures in your concert programme, or even in your food. I tend to loathe digital "flatness" which has no character, no personality. This void is often referred to in interviews with multimedia masterminds who seek to fill it, yet is difficult to define. Not unlike pornography, perhaps you know it when you see it.

Making textures also gives me pleasures because it's the pictorial equivalent to the days when I used to create batches of sounds out of synths + samples for compositions which eventually ended up in the Final Selection and others. It really does nurture the creative soul, and if me doing this encourages you to give texture-making a shot, I say, go for it! To this day, really distinct and appreciable artistic texturing styles are relatively rare in Second Life. There are YUGE gaping holes all over the place, and the world is rife with opportunities for the passionate artist.

Use Torley Textures as you please. Remix, reimagine, saturate, antiquate, lucidify, transmogrify, etc. They're FULLY-permissive so your imagination might know better than mine. There's no real condition, nor strings attached (those dancing marionettes drive me crazy!), but if you'd like to let me know what you made with Torley Textures, please do.

Tagged as: General, Ideas, Pictures, Textures