Inspiration rarely comes knocking at my door; I usually have to step outside, wander around a bit, and invite it in. So I started with a bit of virtual wandering - I loaded Dawn into Poser 9 and had a quick search through the libraries to see what I had to work with. As I've only installed the basic free figure that left me with Dawn in her iconic bikini and ponytail. Her 'LyingDown 01' pose seems appropriate, and I now had Dawn lying on a beach contemplating something... the beach appeared automatically in my imagination as a plain, distraction-free backdrop. So I loaded a sandy groundplane, a diffuse IBL, and a distant light. Now, what's she contemplating? I've recently reinstalled Poser 9 so Andy still loads by default, and he was just standing there calling out "Shrink me!", so I shrunk him to 20% and moved him to Dawn's line of sight. So Dawn's now lying on a beach contemplating another Poser figure. The general idea looks good in preview, so time for a test render. I then spent a bit of of time adjusting viewpoint, lighting, pose and textures. But while I was doing this I started wondering whether Andy was the most appropriate figure to use? Maybe I should use Victoria instead? Perhaps have Dawn, the newcomer, contemplating one of the great stars of the golden era? (and a whole bundle of ideas jumped out there...) But using a second Dawn for the smaller figure struck the chord for me. So I now have Dawn lying on a beach contemplating a miniature version of herself. I decided to leave the miniature Dawn in a 'straight out of the box' state, and concentrate on making the main figure as realistic as I could in order to get a nice contrast between the two. Wearing just that little bikini there's a lot of skin to see, so that was my focus - adding some subtle reflection and increasing the bump strength seemed to bring her skin to life. After several more adjust-render iterations I decided the picture was ready. A final bit of postwork using a depth-cued version of the render to add some focus blur... and then the upload failed! I sent a sitemail asking for advice - as it was the weekend I decided to forget about it until Monday. But on Sunday I sneaked another peek at the picture, and immediately saw four things I wanted to change: her hair should be wet, since she's just come back from a swim; her face should be totally free of makeup; her bikini should be plain black; and the ground should be wet sand. I ended up using some P8 Alyson hair - not fitted, just parented, translated, rotated, and scaled to look right from my viewpoint; I edited Dawn's face textures to get her eyelashes and eyebrows as I wanted, and changed her eyes to the blue version (I was pleasantly surprised how different Dawn looked now, bearing in mind that I didn't use any morphs); for the sand I just added some reflection and bump (via a 3D noise node). And as a final touch and contrast I gave the miniature Dawn's face full makeup. I was tempted to add some props but resisted the urge... Total elapsed time from start to finish: 4-5 days. Probably only 4-5 hours in total actually sitting at the Poser UI. For the rest of the time (including Poser's 5-10 hours a day of rendering) I simply let my subconcious mull over the results of the latest render.