I thought to bring up some interesting things and moments from the past here, and will be introducing them (hopefully) in a series of posts starting now with “From the archives, part 1″.
Earlier this year I was approached by Torley Linden regarding SZ Pianofabrik concert grand pianos. After a brief conversation I agreed to create a custom piano in Torley’s trademark watermelon colors, but meanwhile he bought a copy of the white piano, which appears also on the cover art on “Torley Solo Piano 2” as displayed above.
So I started then the project to create this watermelon piano. I chose dark green tinted wood for the outside, resembling the textured outer surface of a watermelon. And then when you open the piano lid, you can see the inside finished with pink lacquer. Several parts were custom fitted with these new colors and textures in photoshop, and it took a while to apply these on all of the separate pieces on the Model D grand piano, and make sure that every piece is correctly textured too.
In the end it was nice to see this very avantgarde piano come together, and I would recommend you to visit Torley’s blog, and read his impressions about the white SZ Pianofabrik piano as well as the watermelon piano in two very nice articles “torley – solo piano 2” and “If music be the food of Second Life…“.
This was certainly an interesting and fun project to do, and as always like doing custom sails too, it is very nice to create something personal for someone, and see how such an unique custom item in SL can make this person happy too.
Suzanne, how kewl to see this! I noticed your post via the trackbacks on my blog, and wanted to say THANK-YOU again for crafting such a marvellous creation — and I don’t just mean my custom SZ Pianofabrik, but the original too, which inspired me to ask you! The custom one is still on my land in Grasmere, floating on a transparent platform circled by stars atop of the water. It’s very… classy.
I hope you’ll keep creating great art; it’s all too easy to slap a keyboard texture on a long rectangle, so I can really appreciate what you’ve done with the prim keys! All the best.
Thank you for the kind comments Torley, and very glad to hear that you have enjoyed the piano. It was certainly amazing to see the cover art that you had done, and also the various pictures of the watermelon piano on flickr.
(waiting for windlight to get new piano pictures *grins*)