I’ve been writing a lot on my novel-in-progress, but sometimes I get an idea in my head that won’t go away until I let it out in a creative manner. So I took a break from my writing long enough to do some art that I just had to do. I’ve been listening a lot to the latest album from Meg Myers, and one of the songs on the album is called Lemon Eyes. I saw on Twitter an image of Meg Myers with lemons placed over her eyes, produced apparently by some app. I don’t go much for that kind of app, but my mind got going about creating an image in DAZ Studio where a person has lemons, not over their eyes, but in their eyes, so that they actually had lemon eyes.
I had to at least give it a shot. The first thing to do was to find some lemons. There were models of whole lemons for sale in the DAZ store, but I rather wanted them cut, like the ones in the Twitter image I saw. A Google search led me to pixabay.com, where I found several free pictures of lemons, though not all of them were suitable for my purposes. I finally decided on this image:
I cropped out the face of the lemon and removed the seeds so they wouldn’t look like they were sticking out of the eye. I ended up with the lemon in this form:
Then in DAZ Studio, I loaded a figure I hadn’t used before, just to be trying something new. For the curious amongst you, the figure is Caitlyn For Victoria 4.2 and Genesis. Caitlyn comes with a few different eye textures. I applied one of them. Then I looked to see what texture file it used for the iris surface. I loaded that texture file into my photo editor and placed the cut lemon into the picture over the top of the part of the image used for the iris. Saved the altered image in a DAZ Studio runtime folder. Back in DAZ Studio, I assigned the altered texture file to the iris surface.
I didn’t want the pupils to show in the eyes, so I scaled them all the way down. You can still see them, but they’re just dots. Then I sized up the irises, so they filled up most of the eye socket. And I had my lemon eyes! I put some hair and makeup on the figure, threw in some lights, and rendered. Here’s the result:
After admiring this for a while, I thought, hey, why not go all the way with the tribute idea, and advertise Meg and her new song by putting her name and the name of the song on the image. I could have taken the image above into a photo editor and plopped on some text, but I thought it would be better to have DAZ Studio render the text. So I looked for a good place in the image to put the text, and really wasn’t seeing any I was happy with. Okay, I backed the camera off a bit so I could expose some of Caitlyn’s bare skin below her shoulders. That gave me plenty of room between her neck and breasts to place some text.
In my photo editor, I created a couple of images with text on transparent backgrounds. One of the images said “Lemon Eyes” and the other said “Meg Myers”. I then used the Layered Image Editor in DAZ to place the text images over the upper torso area. I turned down the opacity for the text layers, so some of the skin texture could show through, with the intent of giving the text the look of being inked on her skin. Here’s the final image with the text added (with my Twitter handle and the date placed in the bottom right corner):
I’m quite happy with how this image turned out. If anyone wants to redistribute this last image to promote Meg Myers and her Lemon Eyes song, feel free. I think Meg deserves a lot more attention than she gets, so if I can do a little something to help promote her, I’m glad to do it.
To that end, I’m embedding the video for Lemon Eyes by Meg Myers below. If you’ve not seen it, then here’s your chance.
Thanks for stopping by!