So much of my time in Second Life is spent promoting my current Second Life business, Kitty Cattery or working at Lionheart Estate that I apparently forgot to promote the one thing I do more in real life than those two things combined. It’s amazing to me how many people didn’t know that I am a freelance graphic artist for a living. I don’t know why I just expected everyone to know that. Oops!

Now that the cat is out of the bag (haha, see what I did there? Kitty Cattery… cat… *ahem*), I have taken time to share a bit of my work as well as establish some pricing. or if you need a logo or branding done for your Second Life business (or real life businesses too!), you can Hire Me.

I thought this blog post would be a fun opportunity to share more about myself and how I really got into this line of work – both as a graphic artist as well as a texture artist on virtual platforms.

In 2005 I met my real life best friend while playing an MMORPG known as The Realm Online. It’s a 16 bit game, so the characters are basically just pixels and I started off using MSPaint to draw new clothing on the characters that wasn’t actually apart of the game. These little pixel drawings really caught on and I found myself making a little virtual money for doing these modifications for other players to be used as signature images and avatar displays on the forums.

This artwork lead me to being offered a position on a volunteer panel of players working directly with Norseman Games where I designed elements which are still used today!

After finding out that I was using MSPaint to make the dolls, my best friend saved me and introduced me to GIMP, A slightly more advanced graphics program. Once I grew comfortable with it, I started gaining interest in making my own MySpace layouts under the name of “Kimi’s Kreation” (ya know, back in the day when MySpace was a big deal and it was trendy to make layouts for it haha). In retrospect, my layouts were pretty terrible but I thought I was so bad ass at the time. Clearly, I wasn’t.

I didn’t let that stop me! I wasn’t really making money from my MySpace layouts (probably because they sucked) and it was suggested to me by a friend that I open up a store on CafePress.com and sell my designs on t-shirts. I loved the idea of having an online store and by that time, I was pregnant with my daughter and knew we could really use the additional income. So I set out to start my first online business, “Kimi’s Kustoms”.

In retrospect, the design ideas for the shirts weren’t bad. In fact, now that I am looking through my old Photobucket accounts at them, I may just revamp those designs and put them up in my new store. The graphics however, were quite poor in quality. Regardless, within a few months I started to make sales and made pretty good money considering the little amount of work I was putting into it.

It was around this same time that I took an interest in website design. I designed and even coded the website used for my CafePress store in addition to a HTML based website to promote my products. Both were pretty sad attempts, but paved the road for all that I know today.

As you can see, the site was pretty basic and the graphics just make me sad. But at the time, it really was incredible work to a lot of people.

One day as I was browsing MySpace, I began seeing advertisements for IMVU, a 3D Chat “game”. I took interest in it and found myself there, socializing. I’d originally joined with the idea of getting involved with their developer program to put my real life t-shirt designs onto a virtual platform in attempts to sell the real thing. That idea never really caught on, but it did get me started with developing and I went on to create content there for 4 years.

By this point, I’d ditched GIMP and traded it in on using Paint Shop Pro which went on to be my graphics program of choice for many years despite having Photoshop (which most would argue to be a much more professional graphics program) at my disposal.

Over the course of my IMVU “career”, I created about 1,500 products (that’s at least 1 product every day for 4 years!) which are still available for sale in my IMVU catalog. I’ve textured everything from clothing to eyes, skin, hair, accessories, furniture and even rooms. Towards the end of my active role in the IMVU developing community, I earned the title of “Pro Developer” and continue to hold that title today based on sales and rankings despite having not created any content there in more than a year.

I’m proud to say that I can look back on most of those graphics and feel satisfied with the quality of work. I can certainly do better now, but at least those graphics aren’t terribly embarrassing!

In July 2009, I migrated to Second Life with some fellow IMVU Content Creators. My plan was to expand to a new market where there were more people and greater profits to be made. I got sucked into socializing for a while, but eventually started my first business on the platform called “Trash”. I began making clothing, skins and eyes but found that my level of quality was quite low in comparison to much of what was available on the market.

Fortunately, I found my way to breedables and took up a new business, Jolly Farm.

Jolly Farm set the pace for my Second Life business ventures. It’s what I’m most known for and I’d like to think that the brand is relatively well known both in name and in visualization by the breedable community. About a year ago, I suffered computer problems and had to migrate from Paint Shop Pro to Photoshop since I’d lost the disk for PSP. Almost a year into the use of the program, I’m quite comfortable with it but still learning new tricks every day.

And yet, my most notable of branded logos came with Kitty Cattery.

While the logo is simple, it’s easily the most versatile branding I’ve ever made – easily tagged onto products in a variety of ways and able to be scaled down for vendors. Kitty Cattery became more than just the name of a business, it became an actual brand for a series of products – which is difficult to do and is what big name corporations strive for in creating a logo and brand for their business.

Both Jolly Farm and Kitty Cattery are well known for their high quality textures. I put a lot of work and pride into the products made for both stores. I look on those products with a feeling of accomplishment and hope to do so in another 5 years when I’m looking back on stuff of today!

I’ve fortunately gotten much better at websites, although I dabble strictly in self-hosted WordPress sites these days. Some examples of my work include:

• SookieSlafford.com
• JollyFarmOnline.info
• KittyCattery.biz
• TheAlluringArtist.com

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little walk through time. I know I did! I had a lot of fun looking through old files and laughing at some of the work I used to think was totally awesome. If the images above didn’t scare you off, feel free to check out my Hire Me page for more examples of my current work, packages and pricing options!