We're back with the Designer Spotlight! This news segment is fully dedicated to put a designer in the spotlight. We've asked them about themselves, their creations, their process and their inspirations. This spotlight is for and by Eloquinn!
Let's introduce!
My name is Nils also known as Eloquinn on gSm, but known as Lithunium Snow to the wider internet, also also also known as Sonia Rykiel/Cimara on gsm 1.0! I’m a 27 year old artists from the Netherlands. I’ve always been a massive fan of fashion, design, art, and gSm itself. In fact, some of my earliest memories include all of these aspects.
Besides microsoft paint on windows XP, the goSupermodel design tool on 1.0 was my first ever experience with digital art, and I suppose I’ve kind of been hooked ever since!
I’ve spent the past 10 years working as a full time content creator, which has been incredibly turbulent with a plethora of ups and downs, but it’s also allowed me to experience the world in a way I had never even dreamed of growing up. My content focus was predominantly centred around artistic make-up, photography, crafting jewellery and headpieces, and intricate hairstyles.
As time went by, I noticed myself struggling being burnt out on creating content for a living, and turning every last one of my creative endeavours into content, along with parasocial behaviour from followers. The combination of outside pressure to perform and create, along with turning all my hobbies into work ended up being very unhealthy.
With a a lot of work and effort to “gain back my spark” so to say, countless career endeavours, therapy, blood, sweat and tears, I have a much healthier relationship to art, creativity, and crafting nowadays.
I’m still at a place of searching for “my place” so to speak, but I’m thankfully now in a place where I feel confident about having a career in the arts again. It is unlikely that content is in the cards for me as I’m in a much more comfortable place without the pressure of 1.3 million people watching my every move back in my “peak”, but who knows!
For now, since finding gSm 2.0, It’s felt like a perfect mid-point so to speak. I started designing again while I was doing pharmacology and working as a pharmacist’s assistant, (which unfortunately as of very recently I’ve quit) which was extremely hectic and took up a lot of my energy. It’s allowed me to have a creative outlet that didn’t feel as high-entry. I think pixel-art is difficult, absolutely, and it’s a whole medium of it’s own, but it simply does not require the same amount of energy and effort as full-scale illustration, at least for me, and that’s been REALLY nice for me.
My design process is very messy. I think generally people tend to have a sort of step-by-step workflow, with colour palettes, etc, but I kind of work a lot more abstract than that. I do have a few basic design rules, but it’s hard for me to for example create a step by step guide of how I design. I generally work very painterly, all over the place, and kind of like I’m making an oil painting. I think having pretty intense ADHD, I can hyperfocus on small things for a long time, so sometimes my WIPS end up looking more like this than I’d like them to.
For example, here’s a little compilation of the process for the design I’m currently working on.
In 1. This was actually the first concept for the entire design, this was a combination of a top I made in 10 minutes to show another designer how I make glittery textures, and a very quick little iteration of the “designing together July 2026” prompt,
You can see I realised I didn’t like the black coat I made, so I started over, and I started fully rendering the actual coat, but as you can see in 3, I only did one side at a time.
I actually added some hair based on the original pink hair I made, might still render the original pink one at some point but for right now I will not. Also added the back of the coat,
Added a see through turtleneck
Changed it to an opaque orange turtleneck,
Changed it back to the see through one, recoloured, and did a funky button up,
Realised the turtleneck made it feel too much like a “shein fit” for me, and rememebered that one of the themes on one of the JD competitions I participated in on 1.0 was “lace and leather”, and decided that I wanted to turn this into an interpretation of that theme. Added lace stockings, a leather hat and boots, a lace corset, pearls and made the dress shirt more neutral.
As you can see, my process isn’t very straight forward, and I tend to make a lot of items that I end up scrapping that end up giving me other ideas, BUT for most of them they might actually show up somewhere else in a different design some day!
As mentioned in #8 of the previous section,
Here’s a little more information and details of said 1.0 JD competition in 2014. I didn’t end up winning, but it was super fun to participate!
Okay so:
1 : I cant actually find any high quality pictures or my actual finished submission BUT the theme was leather and lace! Designing in the original designer tool on 1.0 was much harder than it is now
2: redoing the theme "leather and lace" in 2026! Still a workaround in progress obviously
3: once again, no high res version anywhere but you get the idea, this was for the second round if I recall, the theme was something something to do with space,
4. Some of the other entries for "leather and lace"!
Many good memories, still wish I could've been a JD, but it’s been really fun getting to design for the community shop too!
Swatches
A lot of people ask me how I do swatches for for example hair and clothing
A lot of the time I tend to start with a lighter base colour, because recolouring to be darker is easier than recolouring to be lighter as when an item is on the lighter/medium side, it’s a lot easier to include a lot of detail, and get your contrasts to be as you want them to be. From there you can adjust colours, hues, tones, contrasts and brightness with editing tools.
I do however sometimes have some discrepancies between lighter and darker swatches. Sometimes when recolouring, things just do not look quite right, and in that case a lot of the time I just end up re-making the entire texture in a light, and a dark version, and sometimes I just make adjustments based on the recolour, so sometimes when you go through swatches of for example a hairstyle I made, the actual texture on them can be different from one colour to another simply because it looks better. Yes it’s a lot of work, and I’m not saying I -always- do that, BUT when I get the time and energy, I definitely think it’s fun to do so!
Some examples of this include these hairs!
If you go through the swatches you’ll see some of them have a -slightly- different texture,
And even with items like this dress, which was one of the first items I ever made, you can tell that I had finished all recolours before deciding I actually wanted to change the texture of the dress to be more satin-y.. however instead of just redoing the recolours entirely, I decided for some reason to manually add the highlights I wanted on there to each recolour, resulting in basically every swatch looking different.
Inspirations
For my inspirations, I’m inspired a lot by haute couture. Bespoke vintage pieces, designers like Thierry Mugler, Alexander mcQueen, John Galliano and Rahul Mishra. I know I tend to generally be a little more “normal” with my designs, but I’m very much starting to lean more into whimsy, and fantasy.
There’s also a lot of designers on gSm itself that have inspired me, like Jopie, Framboosiiej, Yuuni, Ellie, triptych, Spigg, Melon Soda, Lulu., Fizzarolli, Mommy, Ekaemma, Qaz116, Ssonder, Petrikor, Verdana, LijaLija, Heavydirtysoul, Libelle, St4rlet, Priestley, No body, no crime, Ano, Issey Miyake, Leni15, applehoax, Hastings, Goblinbazooka and Mis Auris just to name a few,
It’s helped me a lot to study and look up close at how they’ve managed to do certain things, and made certain shapes and how they’ve translated certain things into pixel art.
I also use a lot of references for fabrics, for example for the aforementioned red leather coat, I think I’ve used about 8 separate references of different leather coats.
Tips for other designers
Delete your work. That sounds scary and aggressive, but what I mean by that is that for example when there’s 1 part of a design that you’ve been rendering for hours and still don’t feel confident about, delete it. Change it. Start that part over and try something else! I know it’s scary to get rid of something that might’ve taken a long time, but if you’re truly unhappy with them after trying every solution you could think of, try to start that part over instead! Don’t be too precious. It can help feed your creativity, and propel you forward in ways you didn’t think possible!
Also, big tip I have is to upload your designs as pictures to gsm before submitting. It gives a pretty good idea of how your items are actually going to look once uploaded in the community shop. Compression takes away some quality no matter what, and by occasionally uploading your designs as pictures to gsm, I think you can really use that to your advantage to see where for example you need a sharper line, or a higher, or lower contrast.
I know it’s excessive but i’ve spent at least 100 diamonds on -just- that in the past month haha
I think as a designer I’ve taken quite a few risks, especially when it comes to body parts. I remember when I first produced my torso skin detail.
I had read through the rules thoroughly, and posted in the designer discord group several times, and realised despite the fact that it doesn’t say in the rules, we kinda all thought we weren’t allowed to do that, so when I tried, and it -WAS- in fact allowed, it felt really cool! It took a lot of time to actually make and get all the swatches right, so considering how much time it actually took initially, i think it was a big risk, but it paid off! That first torso I made actually turned into the 2nd most sold item in the community shop the entire year, which I was not expecting, but it’s very cool that it did!
So in short: take more risks, try things even if nobody has tried before!
My favorite items/looks have been these: click!
It may have a bit of a recency bias but I think it’s easily my best technical work so far. Also I -HATE- making shoes with a passion, and I think I actually did quite a good job on these, and I’m proud of them!
It was inspired by a combination of things, including the song “freakum dress” by Beyoncé, but also by Cher in Bob Mackie.
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Also, this entire look. Inspired by a combination of the sims 1 Flamingogo dancers, and Thierry Mugler’s “birth of Venus” clamshell dress. It’s not out yet, but it’s been accepted for competition use and I can’t wait to see what it’s going to be used for! All and all the whole thing took about 60 hours to complete, but I tried a lot of new techniques, and I think it turned out very cool! |
Future plans
I actually have a bunch of very exciting things coming up in the future! As you’ve seen earlier in all this, I shared some previews of an upcoming design, but I’ve actually got a few collabs coming up soon, and a plethora of other concepts and ideas that I’m itching to actually create!
I think generally, most of us designers would love to some day have the ability to become a goDesigner and call this our job, but for now, I’m perfectly content creating things as a community designer!
All and all, I’m really glad to be apart of the amazing community of designers we have on gsm. There’s SO many talented, wonderful people on this website, and I’ve really cherished that this past year that I’ve been back on 2.0. I didn’t quite expect to feel this level of community, but it’s truly been wonderful.
As for something to anybody that’s out there thinking about maybe designing something; do it. There’s no stakes! Not everything you’re gonna make is going to be a hit, and you’re not gonna be perfect right off the bat, but that’s the fun in all of it. “Figuring it out” and experimenting is the fun part. Nobody starts out being fantastic at art, and I think if you want to try, don’t hold back!
And as you can see from my first design on 2.0 that I made about 8 months ago, vs my most recent; practice makes perfect. Hell, I still think even now I have a LOT to learn.
Eloquinn's: goSupermodel profile, goSupertools profile, design page
Thank you Eloquinn! For this detailed insight in your designs and your process of designing! The goSupertools team appreciates the time and effort you've put into the interview. We can't wait to see what you'll create in the future <3
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