How to create a work-safe avatar skin

After I createdÂ yesterday’s Hillary Clinton Avatar and uploaded it to the Kitely Marketplace, Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner reminded me that, with an adult skin, it needs to go into the “Adult” category — I would need to create a new skin for a “General” listing.

He pointed me to a set of useful skin templates.

Some of the free skin templates available from Kitely.

As I mentioned yesterday, I have no artistic skills — even painting underwear on an image is beyond my abilities. But what I can do is cut and paste.

Here is how I turned an adult Hillary Clinton skin into a safe one:

Step One: Open both the skin and the template file in GIMP

Make sure they’re the same size. In this particular case, the Hillary Clinton skin was 512 by 512 and the Kitely “safe” skin template was 1024 by 1024. I resized the second one to 512 by 512.

Then copy and paste the Kitely template as a second layer over your own skin. Select the white underwear region — I use the little magic wand tool to select the back of the underwear then shift-click to select the front. Then I go to Selection>Invert to select everything except the underwear and then I hit the delete button. Ta da! Everything except the white underwear is now gone and my skin is safe for work.

For the top half of the skin, I first erased the words “Torso Front” and “Torso Back” that was written on the underwear.

Here’s the result:

Hillary Clinton Avatar with baked-on underwear.

Download the Clinton upper skin with underwear file here, the Clinton lower skin with underwear file here, and the Clinton face skin file here. Or pick up a copy of the newÂ Hillary Clinton Safe Avatar here.

Then it occurred to me that I could really use baked-on underwear on my own skin.

There have been so many times I’ve teleported somewhere and discovered I was naked. Or had toÂ switch outfits in a hurry — always worried that I’d be naked for some part of the process.

Of course, while Hillary Clinton is an elderly lady and needs grandma-style underwear, I consider myself a young, hip gal about town.

So I adjusted the underwear a little bit to show more skin.

My new skin with baked-in underwear.

If you want a copy of the underwear, download my strapless bra underwear template file and my boy short underwear template file.

Since both are just white on a transparent background, they won’t show up if I paste them here, but you can see the GIMP screen grabs below.

Open them in GIMP, then paste them as new layers on top of your existing 512Â byÂ 512 upper and lower skin files. These are technically based on the original Kitely templates but at this point they’ve been modified so much, that I don’t think the Kitely guys will mind if I release them under a CC0 license.

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Maria Korolov

Hypergrid Business editor and publisher Maria Korolov is a science fiction novelist. During the day, Maria Korolov is an award-winning freelance technology journalist who covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and enterprise virtual reality. See her Amazon author page here and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and check out her latest videos on the Maria Korolov YouTube channel. Email her at maria@hypergridbusiness.com. Her first virtual world novella, Krim Times, made the Amazon best-seller list in its category. Her second novella, The Lost King of Krim, is out now. She is also the publisher of MetaStellar, a new online magazine of speculative fiction.