AveryGriffin

/slides in I second this.

The reason I decided I wanted to be a child avi is because I wanted to stay away from the more explicit parts of sl, which can be a pain if you wander around in a sexy (objective) avi. Who knows I might just grow up to be a cat. Anyhoo~~ when I was little I was always chubby, so by second grade I had to wear a bra, and when I got older and puberty hit I lost the baby fat but not the chest fat, so puberty kinda just overlayed on what I already had, which made the issue worse. Now I've got DDs and it really upsets me that I cannot find any clothing for flatchested or smaller chested avis (for if/when I grow Ave up). They might be nice to look at but they are a pain (literally) and I don't want to make my avi look like me in that way because that's something I never really liked. That, and I'm not looking for the attention. So when I see teen avis (rp'd not actual rl teens fyi) wandering around wearing unfortunate clothing choices for their ages (I'm not going to police you 18+ ladies rock those minis) I just kinda deflate and wonder if they are wearing that just because they never could when they were that age? Or if they feel that's how teens dress nowadays? (not if they want to stay in school) It's been a while since I was a teen, but all the girls I knew wore jeans, tennis shoes, and cute blouses. Not these skin tight dresses with boob windows and thigh high boots. There's a line there they are passing every time they claim an rp age of under 18 and prance around like that. Same for you boys, though. What's with all the shirtlessness? You're 16, nobody wants to see your puberty muscles put those away. Oh and all the underage tattoos. Why. well this post got away from me sorry

Hello! I am a child avi (currently 10, turning 11 on Halloween) and I've encountered no ill will towards myself or my sister so far. I admit I'm fairly new here, but I've got a long time friend in sl and he's been helping me with things, and one of the things he said to me when I told him I wanted to rp as a kid was 'be careful, people are going to be mean to you'. Which is really strange to me because everyone has been so welcoming and helpful when I've had questions and when I found myself someplace I shouldn't have been, the ims I got where more along the lines of 'hey, might wanna change - don't want you to get kicked/banned!' Though I can see why people are annoyed with kid avis. I'm annoyed with kid avis half the time. The baby talk is dumb. If you've been around kids like seven and older they try to talk super fancy to sound smarter and older. They don't anyways use words right or realize what they are saying (regurgitating what parents say), but it's clear they are learning and they want to 'grow up'. Then you've got the 'orphan brats' who claim they because they don't have parents they have to be bratty. No, if you don't have parents you'll be in a foster home or orphanage and if you're bratty there you're gonna get tossed around to different homes. I guess the bratty kids want to be able to get away with being a jerk but they don't want the consequences an adult would face. I think it's interesting tho, that other people treat kid avis like children. Even if they don't mean to. They talk to you differently even if you're just out shopping (which I do often - I'm self sufficient /shopaholic!!).

Oh gosh thank you all so much for the tips! I'm going to slowly use all of them soon! @Tamara - I'm going to have to try that next time. Usually my issue seems to be I'll take a pic and not know the bg I want till way later But I'm going to give that a try and see if that helps~ @Coby - I'm totally DLing that plugin asap. It looks awesome. TY! @Madelaine - I actually use that tool at my job! I do a lot of cutting out of folks for things and usually transplant them onto a premade bg and it helps to have their hair more natural looking. I tried doing that in the pic above, but the wisps would not cooperate! - I went on location this time to save from hair cut outs. Also because I wanted to play around with shadows and things and see what sl could do if I just stood still and didn't move, haha. (and also because I was dressed for the occasion~) this is a combo of sl deciding shadows and me drawing in shadows - I grabbed multiple shadings (and no shading) in the same spot and just layered everything over and masked what I wanted and what I didn't want. Now that I look at it, it's a little dark :B also the blur is my own add in because I tried to do the built in bg blur but it was crazy o-o

When I signed up I wasn't directed to any welcome area. I was just plopped somewhere scary with a lot of people and I went someplace else. Luckily I had a friend helping me or I'd be lost.

Meanwhile Google is looking like this today~

I think you're confusing form vs function. Let's take a simple chair, for example! This chair was created more for comfort than anything and has a simple yet pleasing shape. This chair is functional for its created purpose. However, it was still designed by someone, and design is an art. This chair, while still called such a thing, had moved on from its original purpose and is now more of a sculpture. This chair has turned into purely form design. You can't really sit on it. This was also designed, and is also art. Then we have this bench, which still very easily performs its intended purpose (you can sit on it), however it has still been elevated to something more of an art form than a simple bench design. It is both a functioning piece of furniture and also a sculpture. It is art. Your teapot, while unfortunate, was not designed as something with no function in mind. It may have been poorly designed, and therefore both useless and annoying, but it was still made with the idea that you can use it. A teapot made out of wicker, for instance, would be form and not functional design. However, both are still art. And who do you think makes the sketches for the good, yet ugly, cars? Just because they aren't up to current standards aesthetic wise (even tho all cars look the same nowadays) doesn't mean it was just poofed into existence. There was still design and thought put into it. And thus, the car is still a work of art.

Oh gosh thank you soooo much!! I was getting sick of the jagged lines aack That expression thing is my fav and I'm so happy you linked that c: Okay so I tried to do this with a greenscreen bg since well it seemed to make sense for cutting out avis (I didn't feel like using the pen tool /lazy) and um the whispy parts of my hair still showed up green no matter what I did after I got rid of the bg >-< SO since that was a pain I just ignored it and kinda, fooled around with shading and tossed some silly bg in for kicks. Then I had to come back to that hair. I got the green a little less noticible and eventually just tossed the whole pic into SAI so I could draw in the hair over it omg Is there a way to like, not have that issue (whitescreen instead??) so I don't have to tear up my pic and eventually just draw over it anyway? also cropped raw & 'finished' pic for ref~~

Seriously! I mean challenge to all of you reading this. Look literally anywhere. ANYWHERE. Just look in a direction, even if it's a wall. Seriously. Now tell me, who designed it? How was it decided to be made? Who did the sketches for it to be made? How did the colors get chosen? How did literally anything you own get made? BECAUSE ART If you think your cars and houses and furniture and cool gadgets just appear out of thin air I have something to tell you. haha

I have very bad depth perception and a condition called 'afraid of the ball' so I was never fond of PE (tho I did like running on the track, but not doing the mile that was gross omg). So usually I'd get away with not doing much by befriending the teacher and just...talking to the teacher during PE time, haha. Also I think I said earlier but art programs in schools are always underfunded to begin with. I can't remember an art teacher I had who was not forced to buy supplies via their own money. One of my teachers in HS just said 'to hell with this' and built a shelving unit in his room and decked out the place with drying racks and bought gallons of paint and let us have at it. He'd bring in these huge boards from home depot for us to use as canvas. Good times.

Monica Querrien wrote: How do people sign documents without writing in cursive? I even heard that some schools cut out phys ed. By writing their name in a super messy false script. Pretty much my signature is First letter -scribble- First Letter -scribble-. Works well enough! Ehhhh idk about that. Schools (at least upper level ones) are always super big on their sports teams (At least in US) and cutting PE would ruin the kid's chances at getting better and beating other schools. Schools usually grab money from the art and music programs before anything else.

Allow me to reply by scaring all of you off with my terrible bas tardchild (why is this word bleeped omg) of print and cursive!

Okay you lost me a bit here. Little kids are the first to grab some crayons and go off scribbling something. If you were to give them a simple line drawing to reproduce set up exactly like those 'trace then write yourself' books with the letters and lines used to teach children how to write their alphabet, wouldn't that effectively be working the same areas of the brain, or am I completely off? And, on that same route, is there anything else children can be taught (that they might actually retain and use later in life) that will teach them the same things you say learning cursive teaches them? Helium Loon wrote: Yes, but at different stages. Developmental cognition passes through several stages. Art is typically more a creative, rather than matching process, and while learning the technical aspects of various mediums DOES provide a similar type of training, it isn't usually something that is used nearly as heavily. Artistic processes aren't rote, and many of the mediums used aren't well suited to very young children. In addition, the content is not fixed (with limited variation) like with cursive writing. They are both important. And they both enhance cerebral development, but in different ways. And while each will benefit the other to some extent, neither trains the other side as well as its own.

I'm gonna have to agree with your whole post, besides this point here: Helium Loon wrote: 1) The cerebrum part of the brain is a pattern matching machine. It's a BIG part of how our higher brain functions work....by recognizing and matching patterns. Learning (and using) cursive helps train that part of our brains to be BETTER at pattern matching. While there IS a standard for cursive, every single writer using it varies their writing of it in small (or sometimes large) ways. By learning cursive, the brain learns not only to recognize the basic patterns, but also develops the flexibility to still match subtle differences. Don't you think children can be taught this exact same thing by taking art classes (drawing/illustration, not 3D things like clay or metal working, or painting and printmaking since those are different) rather than learning a different way to write? Art can accomplish all this and much more. Only most schools heavily under fund art programs because they 'aren't useful', which is a shame. All the art teachers I've ever had ended up providing most of the supplies out of pocket.

Pie Serendipity wrote: What on earth makes you think that my style in these forums relates in any way to that which I used for 45-minute dissertations? People who use non-conversational language in a well...message board usually are the same ones who use superfluous words in essasys to make them look longer/make the writer look smarter is all I'm saying. :B

Pie Serendipity wrote: I ascribe a considerable element of my academic success to the fact that I could write quickly, clearly and in a manner pleasing to the eye for the three hours non-stop that used to be a comprehensive test of rational thinking ability in the days before the "equalisers" started using multiple-choice tick-the-box examinations to bolster the continuous assessment of parental competence. ETA: Occasionally I wrote short sentences. Whoa, I'd hate to be your teacher. o-o Purple prose isn't all it's cracked up to be and teachers can smell BS from miles away. And the 'multiple-choice tick-the-box examinations' are literally only there so the tests can get graded faster and more accurately (via machine). Idk how long it's been since you've been in school, but there are still in-class essays and short answers on tests.

Studio09 wrote: So although some people may not need to learn to write in order to learn, others will benefit from the process. The probelm is that our public schools are like an assembly line. The teaching style depends on the uniformity of the parts (the students). Those that do not fit that mold fall by the wayside. This actually reminds me a lot of a vid I saw recently! I can't embed it here (sadly) but if you guys have like, 15mins to watch something interesting about education - check this out!

I'm talking about the fresh off the shelves, uncracked spine types Though those do have a charm of you being the first to give it a new life. I guess I like preowned because I tend to be nostalgic for ages I've never lived.

So basically it's going to be next to impossible to get any designer to start doing this regularly unless they already are, is what you guys are telling me? That's unfortunate.

That's what I mean. I'll buy a paper copy and if I can find it for my kindle, I'll get a copy there as well. I read a lot of older fiction (70s-80s) and generally I can only find any copy via second hand stores, but I kinda like those versions better than the brand spankin' new stuff. Always fun to read the 'this book belongs to:' and little notes people add like 'I don't think MC was being v. smart'. Good times.

I'm not sure it's laziness so much as unneeded and unwanted in higher level education and professional fields. As I said in my earlier post, I retained very little of what I considered a waste of my time in 3rd grade and when I got to HS expecting to have to drag out the cursive helper books, none of my teachers wanted it anywhere near them, and would complain when a student wrote in cursive for a short answer on a test/quiz. Also at that time, they wanted everything to be typed Times New Roman 12pt double spaced 1" margin last name and page number in upper right corner!! Apparently the formatting is useful but who knows - the educational system in America is deeply flawed and helpful to a small selection of kids who are good at memorization. They don't have to understand the material as long as they remember the answers! Wow! (I'm a little jaded - can you tell?) @Panther - I will admit to relying heavily on the cash register (which is actually very much an antique in its own right) for figuring out change and the like. However it's much faster than me sitting there counting on my fingers or dragging out the calculator to figure change when someone is standing there staring at you like 'I haven't got all day'. When it comes to printed books vs. ebooks, I used to be hateful of ebooks until I got myself a kindle for school and wow it's just so much more efficient than lugging around 20lbs of text the teacher might not even look at. I like the highlighting and bookmark features and I like how it tells me about how much long the current chapter will take me. It's super handy and I can read it outside and not blind myself with sun-brightened pages. I also bump up the text size to massive to reduce eye strain because I have difficulty putting books down once I start them and little 12 or 10 pt font for a good four hours is a pain! I still cherish my physical books, and often buy two copies of a title I highly enjoy, however I do not hold books on pedestals so many seem to do. The actual physicality of the book is not of importance. It's what's IN the book, the story, the message, the characters, the life inside the pages that matters. You could easily burn a book after reading it, but the story never gets lost if you keep it with you. The way it is delivered doesn't make much of a difference at the end of the day, it's still going to make an impact either way.

I'm still in school (college) so I remember fairly well being in third grade and DREADING going to class during the weeks we spent drilling cursive. I loved school. I loved learning. But I loathed learning how to write in cursive. My print was clean and neat at the time, and I took care in making it legible. I can still go back and read things I wrote before cursive ruined it all. After I learned cursive, my hand was so used to connecting all the letters together and my print became slurred. It looked drunk and there was little I could do about it. I would start neat, and by the third line it would be back to the same slop. I was devastated. My teacher instilled in us that :'You will only be able to write in cursive in High School!' and 'Teachers will not accept print!' and 'You'll need this in your professions!' Meanwhile, when I get to High School and have long forgotten everything about cursive (but retained the drunken scribble), my teachers would hold up papers written in cursive and tell us all with a blank face 'If you must handwrite your work, please do not do so in cursive. I don't want to have to try read this while grading it.' then they would say 'I prefer work to be typed in MLA format. I will ask you to type your papers before I can give a final grade.' And so it was that I found out my third grade teacher was a big fat liar. I work in a print shop and we often get handwritten things to type up for people. It takes everyone in the office forever to get these typed. Not because we can't read cursive, but because in a long piece, it's nearly impossible to concentrate on and understand. It's like trying to read a book written in a script font. There's a reason books are printed in PRINT.

I'm sorry I must be sounding like a pain! But I'm still fairly new to sl and obviously new to mesh (tho I've had oldbie friends helping me out), so I'm still a little lost >-< You keep saying 'no it's not hard' but then you say there's no guaranteed fit? Does messing with one section of a mesh distort all the stuff around it as well? That's what I don't understand, really. Like, is it like....hmm. Okay this will be weird but bare with me - like with spacetime - like a big old sheet, when you put an object in it (say you put a bowling ball in a sheet you've got stretched out), it's going to make the sheet warp and bend to fit the ball (or a planet/celestial body lol). So the mesh creators figure that warping into their 'sheets' for the breasts already, and if they were to make it flat, would that mean they have to effectively iron out the sheet?? And if they do that it's like trying to refold a fitted sheet to factory settings?? I get what you're saying about supply and demand tho. I figured that's why I've found a whopping three creators on the MP who offer kids sizes or reg mesh ('standard' XXS and XS with no breasts) or stuff made for femboys (which is effectively what my child girl avi is doing). I'd imagine there's also the issue with shading and texturing as well. A lot of the mesh I've seen has shadows for the breasts, and if they were going to flatten that area out, obviously no shadows are going to be needed. I know PS tho, and if the creator makes the shading for the breasts on a separate layer, is it so hard to turn that layer off, put in the texture and (bake? is that right?) the texture to the non-breasted mesh? A lot of arguments I've seen are more about the 'but then we'd have to make a brand new texture' argument. Which is silly since layers are your best friend. Also I've noticed the one store I linked has their textures so that there is really minimal preset shading and most of the texturing is graphics. I'm not saying 'make me an outfit that matches my shape perfectly' (because that's what alphas are for, lovely things). It's more just 'is there a way to turn off the boobs on the XXS or XS mesh you already made (without ruining the mesh all together because that's too much work to even bother)? Also I was in no way asking for handouts! I'm very well prepared to pay whatever cost the creator seems fit if they were to offer a 'no breast' option to their mesh. Tho now that I think about it, for those creators who do mesh outfits and also appliers for those large mesh breasts - wouldn't there be a better fit for those breasts on a mesh base that doesn't already have some breasts sticking out?? Don't ladies now flatten their chests to fit on the mesh breasts?

Well I meant more like, taking the smallest standard size and just...pushing in the boob bumps. Idk about making mesh - is it difficult to squish in something like this? Can someone who makes mesh clothing explain this process to me? You'll already know the size will fit otherwise since it's on a standard base, but minus the boobs. :B (also I don't know how to make mesh, so I can't just be like 'oh well nobody has what I want I'll have to design for myself!' - tho I'd be interested in learning if I continue to have issues finding good clothing) Also, for anyone interested, I found a store that sells unisex clothing for petite girls and femboys here - currently waiting to get home to demo pretty much their entire inventory!

Okay so I'm a bit spoiled with how pretty mesh clothes are, but since I decided to be a child avi (yes, I know, made my life hard) I have been searching all over for nice mesh clothes without the boobbump! I don't want my 10 y/o to have lady parts!! I've found one store here that offers regular clothes with a flatchested version. Fateplay has a flatchest/child version to their HP uniforms (soooooo happy!!) There looks like only one mesh for a girl's top that is circulating on the MP rn and it got old fast. There's lots of cute stuff for the mesh child shapes but I don't want to be like, four! Ahh. One store has a few mesh things, but only one style of dress and well. I bought it in one color and that was enough for me. I've found plenty of skirts and jeans and shorts that aren't too hippy (or have a giant booty) that my avi can wear, but she's still stuck on like, the stuff from that store, wearing her HP uniform all over the place (it's just so pretty), or wearing the one free mesh sweater out from that store I mentioned above that literally every other child avi seems to own (not that I blame them). Is it too hard to get rid of the boobs on XS or XXS sized clothing? Am I asking for too much? I don't like wearing system clothing - it makes the flattened chest look rather obvious and gross.