archangel969

Canal city, City hall.

My home at SL ANd in RL now 🙂

And now Canal city is also in the destination guide (and editors picks). Very happy! It was a lot of work but it is so rewarding. I feel definately at home as I walk along the streets and alongside the canal. https://secondlife.com/destination/canal-city

FINALLY ready! Now in Second life: the long-awaited urban version of Dutch estate. What does that look like? Come and find out! Walk along the wharfs, visit the old Amstel Mill, the brewery, the Dutch market, the cheese shop and much more. Taste the city atmosphere with village cosiness as you can only find in Amsterdam, Utrecht or... Canal city!

As mentioned, I am not a builder. I have Blender but don't use it but I do use PhotoShop for textures. But when designing Canal city, I couldn't avoid the wharves. In Utrecht, I am used to walking not only at street level but also below, at wharf level. That's where the canal-side warehouses used to be. Now the so-called wharf cellars are restaurants and bars. I didn't have many prims left but still wanted to convey that atmosphere. Most wharfs you buy on MP don't have doors and windows in the wall. I guess that's sort of unique in Utrecht. So I took a picture of the quay wall I use, edited it in Photoshop and cut out windows and a door there. Used that again as a texture in SL. I still had a cylinder somewhere in my inventory so I could use that as a ceiling. Because, after all, yard cellars in Utrecht all have barrel vaults. Unfortunately, I don't have much space for many wharf cellars, but I have now made a bar and a jazz café. And it really feels like home!

Canal city. Wharf level.

A small market with Dutch pancakes, Dutch street food, stroopwafels, speculaas and gingerbread. I have a love-hate relationship with dummies, but a market without people behind a filled market stall just felt weird (Did those market people all went to the loo?), so opted for this anyway.

Lovely! So stylish and cosy. I also also always struggle with lovely patterns that then turn out not to be seamless. If I really want one I edit it in Photoshop until it is more or less seamless. I multiply it in Photoshop to see if it fits properly (otherwise I have to load the texture into SL every time to find that it doesn't quite fit). Shadows or dark and light areas are the bottleneck. So here you can choose only the dark tiles or the light tiles until they are all in the same shade. But you must be a master at it judging by that beautiful design so you will sure find a way. Best of luck!

Love Canal city at night time!

And if there is a mill grinding grain of course there MUST be a beer brewery nearby :-).

Final touches to furnish the corner house of Canal city where a retired captain lives. He has a showcase of miniature ships in the living room. Some of the miniature ships available on MP are wonderfully detailed! In the bedroom there are Japanese prints of Dutch ships (From the 17th to mid-19th century, the Dutch were the only Westerners allowed to do business with Japan so the Netherlands and Japan had a special bond).

Well, it's restored again! I happened to do the flower wallpaper in the mayor's office when it happened, but now it's back again the way it was 🙂

Oh yes and I did it twice 😞 . Well, it's one of those things from the silly-me-department 😉

Know exactly what you mean and you have a beautiful peacefull home to go to. I can hear the sea when I see the picture!

If you want to edit the individual walls and ceilings etc of a builing, but everything is linked together, remember to select only one individual object when editing. Of course I know. Of course! It's not going to happen to me that the whole town hall gets the design of a floral wallpaper. Nope, not happening to me!

Canal street, fashion shop with background picture of Ed van der Elsken

I do! Thanks for the tip!

I hadn't paid close attention to my land's borders. I built in the sky, so it's sometimes hard to see where it ends. Now I thought: I can put that mill here on the quay. I was wrong. Well, there was place for HALF the mill. Because when I walked across the inner room of the mill, I fell halfway through the floor and there was a text saying that I had landed in another region ánd on someone else's property so I had five seconds to get myself the F out of there. Okay, I guess I have to place the mill futher land inward.🙂. I didn't take a picture of me falling, I was too shocked LOL. But this is the harbour of Canal city AFTER I was forced to move the mill (and the quay). Never a dull moment on SL!

Haha you are right. I live in the old centre of Utrecht which means I rarely go in town at saturday afternoon because of the crowd. But that's part of the game when you live in such a city! And a few years ago I bought a holiday cottage in the east of the Netherlands near the woods. Sort of Canal town vs. Dutch estate in RL. if you can have the best of both worlds grab your chance is my motto.

View on Canal town.

Desperately lacking in prims and trying to do some decorating with the scarce space. A cheese shop and bakery 'The Tompouce.' I love tompouces! I haven't looked up but I think the pastry is called Napoleon in the US and millefeuille in France. On the internet you can find instructions on how best to eat this. Because when you poke the top with a fork, the soft cream squirts in all directions. Anyway, you take off the top, eat that first and then you can easily eat the rest with the fork.

The RL residential house of the mayor of Amsterdam (front and back garden). And the townhall at my SL land. I picked a few elements of the RL backgarden of the house: the lawn, the conifers and the sun dial and placed them to the front garden.

Meanwhile, I continue to work on converting my second piece of land from a park to a canal city. A lot of work, but a lot of fun. I am now working on the town hall from the Amsterdam traditional series by Steam & Mechanics Inc. In fact, this house - that you can buy on MP and also can be seen in Rottendam on SL - is not based on the real Amsterdam city hall, but on the mayor's residence, "Het huis met de kolommen" (the house with the columns). Loosely based then 🙂. You as passionate SL residents might recognise that: going wild like a real nerd on all kinds of variations of wallpaper, ceiling decoration, curtains, etc. And then I also want every room's wallpaper motif to be tulips. I will also hang portraits of Amsterdam's mayors through the ages, as well as the current one. So I'm still very busy with Canal city as you can see!

Well, what about my other destination Erasmus park? Honestly: it's closed. But I'm working on another idea. Wild ideas now and then like flying houses, which turned out to be unworkable or too difficult/too laborious. What then? Now I thought: stick to what you always do. Make a sim from your own roots. So I thought of a city with canals: Canal town. A counterpart to the rural Dutch etstate. But I hesitated, because after all, you already have Rottendam on SL and in terms of houses, every sim with a Dutch theme is fishing in the same pond. Hmm, but once I got going I got excited anyway. So it's a sim with partly Dutch/Amsterdam houses. But what I missed with other Dutch sims is what I also did with Dutch estate: a street both at ground level and a street down at yard level. Because houses take up a lot of land impact, I unfortunately have to fall back on scenery building from time to time, and I can only partially decorate a few houses. Anyways, I'm far from finished! So you can't go there yet, because I'm standing there with a head red of concentration trying to fit things together. That's how I work: making a plan in advance and then deviating from it later very intuitively. To be continued, but it will take a month or so! But here is an impression. Feels a bit like Amsterdam or Utrecht, but more like a smaller old cosy Dutch city with canals. So, it's NOT finished, keep you posted! 🙂

Really great picture, love that clair-obscure! What I also like about the landscaping is that the house is so cosy sheltered by the trees but at the same time in connection via vistas with the open water. Anyways, photoshopped like a pro. And I also shout at PhotoShop from time to time 🙂