Is there an easy/basic way to make clothes

Hiya....ok....I really want to make clothes and ive been sitting staring at that tutorial with the templates for quite a while now and im completely lost....perhaps someone with patience can shed some light on me. My program I have is Photo Impact 10 so its realatively similar to Photoshop with layers and such.....perhaps someone can help a lost sistah out...either here or in game.......THANKIES...

It's hard to do good tutorials in a particular program without owning that program, so I'll just give you some general advice instead.

Think of how you learned to drive. You didn't learn to drive a particular car; instead, you learned the various concepts of what makes driving driving. Armed with that knowledge, you can now sit in pretty much any kind of car, and "know" how to drive it almost immediately.

Try to do the same with your paint program -- get familiar with "layers" as a general concept, learn the basics of colour (RGB, YUV, bit-depths, etc), learn about alpha (transparency). Most terminology that you don't know can be found easily with Google or another web search engine.

Just play around with the program a bunch, and make a lot of small test images, to get a "feel" for it. Then, you will be able to take a tutorial for Photoshop (or a different program), and go through it on your own program, making the appropriate convention substitutions where necessary.

Good luck!

Unfortunately, clothes today in SL are not easy nor fast - nothing to do with Linden Labs, i's just very hard to get right.

As far as I'm aware, almost all the top clothing designers in SL are pro/semi-pro graphists with years of ewperience in 2D and/or 3D designs. So clothes are something that, today, you're probably better off buying in SL than designing yourself.

There are 2 exceptions:

If you just want to create cool and fun TShirts. Because then it's mostly a matter of your creativity and humor, and you can find stock Tshirt templates.

If you are building Prim attachments rather than clothes. The building tool are easier and better - relatively speaking - than the clothing ones, and beginners can build impressive stuff with just a bit of care and dedication.

While it's true that it takes a lot of time and care to make nice looking SL clothes, and with experience you get better at it, it is by no means that case that you have to have extensive graphic design experience to make some nice stuff in SL.

I started making SL clothing just after I began playing in SL and I had no graphic art experience before that. I painstakingly learned Photoshop and got better and better at creating and manipulating textures to make the clothing I wanted. I used to sell a lot of clothes and make a tidy sum at it, but I got burned out last summer and threw in the towel.

The hardest part about making SL clothing is learning a graphic arts program like Photoshop or PaintshopPro or Gimp well enough to make what you want. If you want to make clothing to sell in SL, the hardest part about that is finding a way to market your things. A lot of the clothing that sells really well in-world isn't necessarily stuff that requires the most gee-whiz-you're-an-artiste! skills, it's stuff that's marketed well. And, once you learn a bit about the graphic arts program of your choice, it's fairly simple to look at clothing from established designers and figure out how they accomplished the effects they did.

If you're going into clothing making in SL just to make some nice things for yourself, learn the skills and you're set. If you're going into clothing making to sell mega-oodles of stuff, learn the market, make what sells and develop some mad networking skillz to place your products in high profile spots.

When I first started trying to make clothing, all I did was upload textures, and then use the tools in the appearence to make my clothing. It helped me to get a grasp on what was possible. You can get some great results just by doing that. And then later move on to making modificiations in Photoshop.