So, one of the things a lot of us are still perfecting is how to get the exact look we want our avatars to have. Or not, and in which case, never mind. Personally, I think it's much cooler if someone makes their own avatar's clothes, rather than just purchasing it. I know I'm being hypocritical because I bought mine, but I do hope to get better at making clothes that I will be confident enough the make my own some day.
Here's what I know about the wonderful Appearance mode:
~If you want to use a custom clothing texture, select build, then upload, then image. And of course, it costs money to add it to My Inventory, because let's face it, how else can they get money from you. Sorry, that's just me being bitter about my fraction of a penny being lost.
~Right click on your avatar and click My Appearance
~Afterwards, click the picture of a little gear at the bottom of the appearance window. Then select new clothes.
~From there you can choose whatever you want: shoes, shirts, skirt, whatever. With whatever item you choose, you have multiple sliders on which to adjust you characters clothing.
~ Then click the Texture box to select a clothing texture from My Inventory, or drag the texture from My Inventory onto Texture. This is pretty vital. Without it, your clothes will look bland and kind of awful. You CAN make textures with photoshop, but lets face it, I'm lazy and too poor for photoshop, so I (and potentially you!) just buy textures from the Shop icon at the top of the SL viewer.
~The last step is to obviously save. It would be a damn shame to have all that effort put to waste because of something dumb like that (but lets face it, we've all had our moments).
Now, I realize that there's a way to create clothing outside of the My Appearance, but I haven't quite figured it out and am far too lazy to tinker with it quite yet. Perhaps in the future I'll go more in depth. Because after all, your avatar is supposed to be a representation of who you are, blah blah blah artsy Columbia stuff. Either way, you should probably take time creating a neat looking avatar, because it's the first thing you'll learn to make in this class, and that in itself is pretty rewarding.
Making your own clothes in this way is not difficult. It is also possible to find free textures inworld. Clothing layers also use templates (available on SL's website) for use with Adobe Photoshop or GIMP. Following the templates is a little tricky, but you can make realistic looking clothing and hide many seams that are out of place. The first step of course is to look at the clothing, both in images in shops and on the web, and as worn on avatars. Clothes are also embellished with prim objects and other 3D object types such as sculpties and mesh. And of course after you create your clothes, you'll want to take a picture.
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