As the Gallery Turns, Part 2

Last month I posted the nutshell version of how I became a gallery co-owner and builder in SL. When I left off, my pal Dillon had given me a 512 square meter plot on his new sim to build a coffee house and gallery. But Dillon has a talent for growing a seed of an idea into something much bigger. Hand in hand with that is a propensity to change his mind midstream, which usually results in an improvement even though it means extra labor.

One of the first things I noticed about Dillon’s town was that he had laid out curbs but no sidewalks, so I kept tripping—or sounding like I was tripping, anyway—over the curbs. I suggested we needed sidewalks and built one in front of my coffee house. Dillon liked it and asked me to continue around that block. At some point we noticed that the city blocks Dillon had laid out weren’t all the same size. He had intended for them to be the same, and before I could take another sip of coffee, he had decided to re-do most of the island. I grabbed my existing coffee house and sent it 100 meters in the air, and Dillon proceeded to remove the rest of his build.

The next time I saw Dillon, he invited me to the island to see the new layout. He had purchased a crossroads, complete with paved road, sidewalks, and little patios on each corner. The idea was to have my coffee house and gallery on one corner. I started building.

Now, I don’t draw, and I’ve never studied architecture. I do sometimes examine buildings in SL to see how they were constructed: how a cove trim was made, the number of pieces it takes to make a nice awning, what sort of roofline looks good. So I’m likely to just start rezzing prims, cutting paths, and putting them together to see how it looks. I’m likely to change my mind about the size or proportion halfway through and start sliding walls out of the way and resizing the build. That means I need a BIG sandbox!

Here’s the coffee house and gallery, in progress and finished:

There's a patio between the two buildings, which serves to tie them together. I may tweak the gallery building a bit, when inspiration comes.

Next time, building furniture and being asked to construct a furniture store for another Janustown resident.