The other evening I surprised Ando!
While waiting for him to show up at our appointed hour, I did not, repeat, did not . . . . drum roll . . . go shopping. Yep! You read that right. Until fairly recently, my pastime of preference was to scan the blogs and then fly about to snag the latest pair of jeans, or go on the current sim-wide holiday hunt – right now it’s all Easter eggs, or take in a fashion show or a new store build. Ando had gotten into the habit of asking on log in not what am I doing (he knew the answer – SHOPPING!!!) – but where am I doing it?
Lately, though, something has shifted. Call it a change in my learning curve (seems a bit less steep these days), a new addiction – I am seriously hooked on flow (see last entry) – or an evolution in my avatar consciousness, but I have been staying home . . . or rather, staying in the studio/workshop the Symphony lighthouse has become for me.
And engaging in my new favorite pastime – prim doodling.
Prim doodling is easy and fun and absolutely free! My Linden balance loves that last part! Here it is in a few easy steps:
First rez a prim . . . a cube is fine.
Then begin altering its shape by playing with the various sliders on the edit menu.
Twist it and torture it, change its size and rotation. Give it some siblings. Change their basic shapes from cube to cylinder or prism or torus ~ the wildest of all ~ and continue playing with the sliders. Seriously, this is a great jog to creativity! One of my prim doodles gave me a single prim object that looked like a door handle, which led me to build an entire armoire around it. Another gave me a Market Basket, for which I used a free texture available from http://www.cgtextures.com.

A great way to pass the time . . . and furnish your house!
It gets even more fun when you move from the edit tab to the texture tab and begin adding textures to the various faces of the prim, and tweaking those sliders as well. Try adding glow in various increments or some degree of transparency or shine. Give it color. Rotate and repeat. And use as textures anything from your own SL snapshots to metals, woods or fabric. Some are even included in your inventory’s Library. Again, all free, as you can also easily import images from outside SL to become textures (10 lindens per download) or pick up free textures from various locations in Second Life. There are also some amazing texture shops, which will be the subject of future blogs. And the textures, full perm, and usually bundled as sets, are well worth their cost because textures can be very versatile . . . again thanks to the edit features SL provides.
The final tab I’ve been playing with is the Contents tab. A simple slow rotation script can give movement to your prim doodles and produce absolutely mesmerizing shapes, providing hours of creative play and relaxation.

A single prim with a slow rotation script can yield beautiful sculptures.
What I come up with is not great SL@art, but it is helping me become a better SL builder and providing inspiration and starting points for new projects. Give it a try! Play with your prims!
~Cacie