Short and sweet

I was checking out the talent at PiRatsthe other day and wow! some of the art was super nice also.   I'm fairly certain that's not low tar. Eventually I got chatting to Dulcis Taurog. We were pretty in pink, it was like an explosion in a peppermint factory, I liked it. She has a show on at another Pirats gallery, called Linkers.
Dulcis Taurog: I make these completely within SL. I make odd objects, color them, then use different lighting and water settings to get the effects. The wave pattern? it's based on a Japanese textile wave pattern i made it for this show, because of the water theme in this gallery. I don't do any art work in RL, I'm self taught in SL, and found my own techniques here. I wanted to make art, and had little opportunity. Then I started to make things here, and found I could make 'painting' like pictures. I just pursued that then, people liked them, and I have even had the chance to exhibit here! I started out wanting to make Japanese houses, gardens and tea bowls. I've always wished I could do paintings like the ink landscapes of Japan and China and I also love the colorful expression in abstract paintings, so I've tried to capture some of all that.
She showed me her abstract art, and explained her process.

Dulcis Taurog: I usually start with an idea, more like an effect I want to try, or I see a painting I want to try to get the feel of here. I think of how I could use the techniques available here to get an effect, but the end result is usually far off my original idea, but still something I like. The biggest drawback to my art in SL is probably the limit on resolution, and my art is only inworld, I've nothing in RL, but I don't mind that so much. The best thing is that I can show people from all over the world, that many like it, and that here I can be an artist. It's also fun that I have developed techniques using refraction and reflection to obtain a paint-like effect. It's tedious in ways, I've shown people and most don't care for it.  But I can show you, right here if you like, it would take about 10 minutes.

She did. Here's her secret... You simply rez a cube into water, preferably somewhere with a nice current or turbulence. Put your preferred texture on the top side and lower the prim until it's below water. Set your camera so you're looking down on the picture. Then you make sure your graphics preference is good or better, and go to world -   sun -   water settings and then mess about with all the sliders to your heart's content. It's a lot of fun and you may make your own masterpiece! I think it's nice that she wants to share her method with others, too. On a personal note, yes, those are very big boots.

Today, though, today was another story. Sometimes you don't have time, but you should make time, and you won't be sorry. Sometimes.

Simeon Beresford and the others were all over at Bookstacks doing the poetry thing, and wow Leslye Writer was there! She snuck an original piece past Simeon; she didn't know the Saturday session is really only for published favourites, who today included Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ogden Nash, and most striking of all, Simeon's reading of Langston Hughes' Daybreak in Alabama in his distinctive Welsh accent.   The piece Leslye read she calls 104, I call it 170 times, it narrates a fragment of life seen through the windshield of  repetition: driving, domesticity, and those places on the way that are visibly unseen - but enough! get her to read it to you, it's much better that way.
I wanted to know more about her life.

Leslye Writer: Listening and writing........that is what I do. I rezzed in 2007, and wandered 'lonely as a cloud' for a few days until I found the writing community. Inksters was my first group. I remained silent and almost invisible as I listened to the Second Life poets and writers until the day I felt courageous enough to read one of my poems. Now I will read to anyone who will listen but I don't have a very expansive body of work for the over ten year old age group. Most of my life I have written for children. I only recently started writing poems for my peers.
Leslye is also interested in Second Life Photography, and will soon open an exhibition of photographs she has taken of SL writers performing at readings over the past three years. If you'd like to see her current show, Pathfinders, it's on over at Da Vinci Isle. She also introduced another amazing piece by W Somerset Maugham the first 'chapter' (it's more like a prose poem) of The Trembling of a Leaf called The Pacific.
Have a read.