Kagami Sato - Winner of the Creative Lighting Competition!

Hello Citizens!

The recent Creative Lighting competition certainly resulted in some very creative use of lights and I spent a lovely light-filled evening looking through all your wonderful entries. Our recent release of the three new lighting features served to highlight the importance of lighting in our spaces, and may I say with some tremendously creative results!

It was a difficult decision, but Honesty was very firm with me and said that I had to choose just one final winner. I got it down to a shortlist of three spaces, and then took a bit of a breather to take that last extremely difficult step of selecting the winner.  But choose I did, and I'm here to present her lovely space to you.

Kagami Sato - Where are You?

I'd like to offer my congratulations to Kagami Sato for her entry - I've selected it as the winner of the Creative Lighting Competition! If you'd like to visit it for yourself - here's the link!

I was so eager to share her entry with you, that I've taken the somewhat unusual step of publishing this story without having even spoken to our lucky winner yet. Who knows, perhaps the first she'll hear of it is when she checks into the latest issue of the Chronicle?

I have of course taken every step possible to contact Kagami. I am sure that within the next day or so she will see my congratulatory emails, and of course she'll notice that her SmallWorlds account has grown by a healthy 3500 Gold!

[I am delighted to say that I have now heard back from Kagami and you can now read a short interview with her at the bottom of the story!]

What I liked about Kagami's entry was the lovely intimate feel she created... whilst retaining a real sense of spaciousness. I especially liked her use of the enclosed floor lights; the pattern created was very appealing, and I also loved the way she used the new wall sconce to write the word "LIVE" - very effective indeed! I did notice other citizens using the lights to write words on floors and walls in their entries also - I'd never have thought of that myself.

Honesty and I would like to offer our congratulations to you again - and of course to ALL of you who made the wonderful efforts that you did. I am sure that like us, you have all received lots of fantastic ideas for lighting your spaces just by looking through the entries. Believe me, it's worth looking through if you need some interior design inspiration.

Thanks so much to you all once again citizens - I'm really looking forward to our next interior design competition.

~ Kent Kronkite

A Short Interview with Kagami Sato

Hello There Kagami! Of course I can't wait to hear how you feel about winning this competition; but also I'm curious about how long you've been playing SW and where you live!

I'm from Texas, USA, and I've been playing SmallWorlds for exactly a year. It feels wonderful to win! I've never really won anything, and I entered without the hopes of winning, but I did it just to enter and see what would happen. I knew I had potential, but I never thought I would actually win. A lot of people had really sophisticated entries, after all.

Just how long did your entry take to create?

It took about 3 hours to complete.

What inspired it? Did you draw on any specific ideas?

At first, it was supposed to be a face, but I didn't have enough gold to purchase a space large enough to fit a face. Plus, the floor lights were pretty big for some facial features and it would be hard to make a small, distinguishable face. I then switched to creating an eye and a space dedicated to eyes. That didn't work out, so I added everything that came in mind - lights that spelled out "live," leftover floor lights that would illuminate some dark spots, etc. I kept an eye in the middle, though. It would have taken too much effort to take all those floor lights out. I'd already removed around 20 cyan lightboxes around it after I had to revise for the third time. Also, I saw that people added plants to illuminate and decorate their space, so I added plants to the space I entered for the competition. Basically, I just added what I thought looked good.

Do you have plans for any other creative lighting projects?

Hopefully, I'll be able to purchase a large enough space and construct the face that I wanted to make. Or if that doesn't work out, I'd make a light maze.

Any tips for people using lighting?

If it looks good, put it in! Mix it well with other lights and furniture. The more creative and original, the better the lighting will be. The floor lights really work for illuminating dark areas. They're really convenient, too, since you can place them anywhere on the floor. If you have a lot of them, you can spread them all out and create shapes and words. Adding lights also adds to the mood. They're good for romantic events, dark missions, and pretty much anything.

What do you most enjoy about being a part of SmallWorlds?

I love being able to share my ideas and creativity. It's also fun to see other people's works. Being part of the creative community is something I really enjoy.