There Was This Moment Yesterday Morning Around 6:30 Am. It Was After A Rough Night. A Fair Amount Of

Damn the stars that shine. Damn the lies that were mine. Damn the lover’s love.

Secondhand thrift stores

and animated movies

This is me; my Life

Custom Wire Wrapped Necklaces

These are the stones I have available for wire wraps, for those of you who are interested!

If you would like to claim one, please be sure to read this entire post!

So here’s the rundown. Below is a picture with each stone numbered, and below that is the name of each stone, along with the price.

The price includes the following: the stone wrapped in the metal of your choice (sterling silver, 14k gold fill, 14k rose gold fill), an 18″ chain finished with a handmade clasp, and it includes free shipping worldwide! 

You will choose the style they’d like it wrapped in. There are three example pics below. 

Payment is due when the stone is claimed and all the options are chosen (metal, style, etc). PLEASE NOTE - these will be completed in late May 2023. I will aim to have them done before the end of that month. They take a long time to make, please make sure you’re okay with the wait before ordering. I put the utmost care into this and have extreme attention to detail, and when that combines with my busy schedule, it means that it can take a while. I always aim to get them done early, but sometimes it’s not possible. If you are buying one for a certain event or deadline please be sure to let me know when ordering, so I can let you know if it's possible for it to be completed before then!

To claim: send me a message over the instant messenger with your email address, the country you’re in, the stone you’d like to claim, the metal you’d like it wrapped in, and the style you’d like it wrapped in. I’ll then send your invoice and get started on your pendant! :) 

*Note* These are some of my best, highest quality stones! I’ve been collecting (and hoarding, if I’m honest) hundreds of top-quality stones for 10 years to build this collection I can share with you.

Here are all the stones:

Brecciated Azurite - $140

High-Grade Old Stock Ocean Jasper - $140

High-Grade Old Stock Ocean Jasper - $140

Lavender Quartz Facet - $155

Highest Grade Rainbow Moonstone - $180

Highest Grade Rainbow Moonstone - $175

Deep Red Garnet - $145

Watermelon Tourmaline - $145

Blue Apatite - $135

Genuine Spectrolite from Finland - $150

XXL Genuine Spectrolite from Finland - $325

Rainbow Obsidian - $135

Gold Sheen Obsidian - $120

Silver Sheen Obsidian - $115

Silver Sheen Obsidian - $120

Lavender Chalcedony - $135

Australian Crystal Opal Triplet - $125

Fire Agate - $125

Mozambique Rose Quartz - $120

Blue Labradorite - $125

Rare Purple Labradorite $145

Rainbow Moonstone - $130

True Silver Moonstone - $140

Lattice Sunstone - $140

Confetti Sunstone - $135

Star Ruby - $140

Chatoyant Sapphire - $160

Red Rutilated Quartz Facet - $135

Epidote Included Quartz Facet - $140

Clear Quartz Facet - $115

Black Tourmaline & Epidote Included Quartz Facet - $185

Harlequin Quartz - $160

Phantom Amethyst w/ Inclusions - $150

Ethiopian Opal - $155

Rare Genuine Andamooka Opal from Australia (15.8 carats) - $435

Vietnamese Ruby Gourd Carving (22.75 carats) - $425

Cat's Eye Pink California Tourmaline (San Diego co.) (12.3 carats) - $230

Morganite from Russia - $170

Chrome Diopside from Russia - $180

Pyritized Ammonite Fossil from Russia - $180

Dianite (Russian Blue Jade) - $160

Amazonite from Russia - $120

"Blueberry" Azurite Geode from Russia - $140

Uvarovite Garnet from Russia - $185

Mongolian Turquoise - $140

These are the styles you can choose from (I do very minimalist wrapping so the stone really shines through! And the wrapping is super sturdy!) 

Style #1 (prongs): 

Style #2 (symmetrical): 

Style #3 (asymmetrical):  

I will cross out each stone as they are claimed! 

Extra little note: I have some square wire if you prefer that to the round, just let me know!

Thanks, everyone :) 

Do you have any advice for understanding hands better? I’ve been practicing them for years but feel like compared to other aspects of anatomy it’s the one thing I haven’t seen much improvement in. I draw both from life and images and draw nearly everyday but nothing I’m doing seems to help

I personally get by mostly from remembering poses that I’ve already practiced a ton, like I figure out how to draw it once and am able to file that away in my brain and use it again later, and tweak bits of the pose or the level of simplification to suit what I’m drawing. 

I’ve paid special attention to drawing hands for like.... most of my life so I have a LOT of poses I’m easy comfy with now, but when I need to figure out something complicated or new, I can usually work it out by breaking a hand down into shapes, remembering a few key points/”rules” from what I’ve learned about hands in order to help me break it down in a way that makes sense. And if that’s not enough either, then I take photo refs. 

^^^ here is a pose I use a ton. I have a quick way of drawing it from various angles. the first time I had to draw a pose like this, I had to think and figure it out, but in drawing it a bunch of times and having to use various angles like this, I’ve eventually come up with a quick, reliable way to draw it from a few of the most common angles that fits the style I like to draw in. I’m blessed with a good memory for observations, so when I see a beautifully posed hand, I can usually really quickly analyze what I like about that pose and why, and that helps me absorb it so I can recreate my saved impression later. But I know not everyone thinks the same way. it might benefit you to quickly scribble down a study in a sketchbook when you see a pose you find beautiful and want to learn from for later.

^^^ here are some poses I had to stop and spend time figuring out, calling up the “rules” for how hands are built to kind of logic-out how they should look from angles I’m less familiar with. results can be mixed, but... if I end up with something expressive that fits the style of the rest of the drawing, I’m usually really forgiving of fudged anatomy or slightly wonky proportions. as long as the thumb is on the right side and there aren’t too many fingers, that’s a great start lol.

^^^ and here are ones I had to take reference-selfies for. I try to use this as a last resort because 1) it’s a lot of trouble 2) interrupts my drawing and 3) if I’m not careful I stick too close to the reference, and the drawing ends up with the hand looking referenced and the rest of the pose not, which is jarring to me. not to mention I have tiny manlet wrists that without fail, look horrific and emaciated in photos, and the lens distortion makes my fingers look scary too... ugh, photo reference has definite flaws. I actually don’t like the look of drawings for which I can Really Tell the artist drew from photo reference, because most often that means they’re taking the ref too much at face value and incorporating ugly lens distortions into their drawing. so I have to think extra hard not only about interpreting the ref, but also might have to make multiple passes just to get the hand to look normal, AND match the style of the rest of the drawing.

Anyway, here are some of the ““rules””” I mentioned earlier that I fall back on to help me figure out more complicated poses:

1. probably seen this before, but basic proportions. the palm is usually half the total height of the hand. obviously you can mess with this purposefully. 

2. I think of joints as like, ball joints or hinges. I find that easier than trying to remember bones & muscles. here’s a drawing of the wrist as a hinge. note that when you’re thinking of it this way, it’s a shortcut, but a shortcut is only good if you use it with precision. notice the pin for the wrist hinge is not just halfway, it’s closer to the top of the hand. being precise about that is what allows this shortcut to work. the heel of the palm juts out, while the top of the hand transitions into the wrist quite smoothly.

3. simplified planes. planes are important yo. in super simple terms: top is flat, bottom is round. this works on the fingers too, actually. the tops are bony and tendony, and the bottom is where the fat is, so it’s rounder and soft

thinking of the hand as abstract shapes REALLY helps simplify the task of drawing hands, and is just as helpful even if you are drawing from reference. I can say “the palm is a box” and obviously the palm is not really as simple as a box, but if I think of the palm, wrist, and each finger joint as various shapes of box, then all of a sudden, psychologically, my task is SO much easier. I’m not drawing a Hand, which is hard, I’m drawing boxes, which is easy.

4. that prominent knob some people have on their wrist? that’s on the pinky side.

1. the knuckles aren’t really a flat row on top. the hand is like a cup right, so your palm can hold water and things. so we can think of the hand as a box to make figuring out the pose easier, but when it comes down to it, you’ll want to make it more of a curve. this curve is why you can see multiple fingers in a side view

2. when curled up, the fingers nestle together. the fingernails also turn slightly toward the center. even if I’m simplifying the hands significantly, I usually still draw the fingernails because they are SO useful for communicating the pose of the hand effectively.

3. lots of people suggest to think of the hand as a mitten, grouping the pinky/ring/middle fingers and singling out the index finger. this works great, the index finger is more independent from the other three. on the flip side, those three are really stuck together; if you’re drawing the pinky curled up all the way, then you better not draw the ring finger sticking straight up, cause that would HURT. anyway, singling out the index finger leads to more interesting poses in my experience.

1. this is another illustration of top = flat and bottom = curved. this is a really easy way to organize your line quality. straight lines and sharper angles where there is bone, and soft gentle lines where there is muscle and fat. your drawing as a whole will read very clearly if you find some guidelines like that to stick to, as it means all your lines are intentional and thoughtful.

2. this one’s about overlaps. when forms overlap, it makes a crease, and when you draw that crease you’re communicating which form is in front of the other. in the second drawing I reversed all the creases, and it looks.... messed up. think about how pieces connect.

so when you’re trying to make up a pose without using specific reference, I think it’s good to think about the.... flow of energy through the pose. honestly, I know it’s really abstract, but if I have an ability to make interesting poses that communicate weight and movement, the things that make people say your character feels ALIVE, like they really EXIST in a space... it’s because I started to think of poses this way. imagining streams of energy bouncing through the body, flowing down the limbs and out through the fingers. this is why hands are so important to me, cause they’re where the kinetic energy of the pose ultimately ends up. I talk about it when drawing the torso and arms and legs, but an interesting drawing has a bounce back and forth between opposites: for every curve, an opposing straight line, alternating back and forth down the entire body. if you’re sensitive to the energy of the pose, then even very simple poses will be interesting to look at.

anyway, with regards to hands, I imagine the energy getting sort of cinched in as it passes through the wrist, and then emanating out through the fingertips. I hope my drawing at least SORT of communicates this imagery. it makes sense because that’s BASically how the bones in the hand are anyway. and then the right side of the image above is just demonstrating some highly simplified gestures. see how the fingers fan out and curl in, rarely parallel to eachother. when you’re figuring out the pose, using a line to stand in for the row of knuckles is super valuable.

aaand finally, here’s two hands where I intentionally neglected correct anatomy and proportion because I felt it worked better for the style of the whole drawing. Left side: since this is a really simple and cartoonish style, I was thinking back to kids’ and shoujo manga I have read where the style was very solid and distinctive, but definitely NOT overly concerned with correct anatomy, or even really drawing hands, uh, “well” at all. to me, that sort of approach has a Look that I like to invoke sometimes, since for years I felt like I learned a bunch of anatomy and proportion and drawing from life actually in detriment to the liveliness and appealness of my drawings. this hand is mushy and makes very little sense, but it turned out as intended. Right side: sometimes I like to pretend fingers only have 2 bones in them, cause i am a Queen and i do what i want

and there you go. I hope that helped, like, at all? Look at real hands and photos of hands and hands in motion, but also look at drawn hands as well. find what you like, and work towards expressing that yourself. and remember the hand is part of the whole drawing. not only in the art style like I’d been talking about, but because the angle and placement of the hand is reflected in the angles of the arm, which in turn reflects on the angles of the shoulder, which affects the whole torso, etc etc etc. and the techniques you can use to understand and draw the rest of the body, works on hands too. as you improve everything else, your hands will improve as well.

DISCLAIMER: I whipped up these diagrams quickly, they’re not meant to be good drawings or accurate refs, just diagrams to illustrate my thought process lol

I'm just gonna talk here for a minute. I've been stuck at home a lot these last few days quarentining. I just have had thoughts I want to share I suppose and when you are single and live alone in the middle of a global pandemic, sometimes it's hard to find an ear. Like seriously TL;DR who wants to be lectured at. So sit with me for a minute or scroll past this I guess. A lot of us are probably familiar with the famous Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh as an Artist. He was born in 1853 to a middle class family in the Netherlands. He was kinda solemn and quiet. He worked as an art broker for a while in London, and even was a missionary for a time in Belguim. Before becoming a full time painter in France. In his life time he made over 800 Oil Paintings mostly in the last two years he was alive. He wasn't successful as an Artist until after his death. In life he only sold one painting. He was known to struggle with Mental Illness. A Great record of this is in The Letters of Vincent van Gogh. They are available for reading for free through the Van Gogh Museum. This where I'm a lot more familiar with the artist. More as a Writer. There's over six hundred collected letters between him to his siblings, to other impressionist artists at the time or even to critics. Written across three languages, Dutch French and English. Most of the Letters are to his brother Theo van Gogh. In his Letters to Theo he writes with this sense of duty, and calling. Of Urgency. Vincent very often questions his place in the universe, and what he could be doing to better it. If I had time to annotate and write and comment about all 600 letters, I would. There is a lot of meat there to understand him as a person, and by extension an Artist. And when you understand someone else's story better you also sometimes understand your own better too. But I'm just gonna take some selected thoughts here and think alongside him. In April 1878 Vincent writes to Theo pontificating about the proverb "We are Today, what We were Yesterday.", to Segway to my next thought I want to say twelve years later in 1890 Vincent would die by a self-inflected gunshot wound. He was 37 at the time of his suicide. There's this book, "A Grief Observed" by British Author C.S. Lewis which was written in response to his wife's death, American Poet Joy Davidman. Lewis writes "The Pain I feel Now, is the Happiness I had before. That's the Deal" it's published almost a hundred years after Vincent's letter. I wonder if in those last few days of their respective lives if they had thoughts that looked like this often. Where Compassion decays into Despair, or "The Pain we are in Today, is the Happiness we had Yesterday". We can't ever know for certain what thoughts Vincent had on that sad height. But back in that April Letter, I think he finds some peace there. In his closing thoughts he writes "Woe-spiritedness is quite a good thing to have, if only one writes it as two words, woe is in all people, everyone has reason enough for it, but one must also have spirit". Almost all of Vincent's paintings were made in the last two years of his life. Those are the things he left behind. Those are things we inherited. His Woe, but also more importantly his Spirit.

The faintest whisper of rain, and a distant clap of thunder. It is here that I find my peace. Underneath the weight of pressure changes am I released.

I think often how we overuse words. And how because of that, words that had potency and weight, sometimes now feel trite or even almost empty, half spoken without conviction. "Beautiful" it's almost as trite and vague as it comes now, it's lost it's meaning. There is no singular word that I can give to you to describe her radiance adequately. There is no word to define the way my heart rushed when her skin touched mine. I thought my heart would never be still again. It may have settled but my feelings sure haven't. It's still racing trying to find some sort of definition. It is like a gnat trying to quantify and calculate the breadth width and height of a mountain or some sort of decimal trying to comprehend all of creation.

what are some really good female led horror films? i know some classics but im only now getting into horror and ill take any rec (can be as obscure as u want, idk)

shock (1977), carnival of souls (1962), nekromantik 2 (1991), baby blood (1990), opera (1987), black christmas (1974), the blood spattered bride (1972), cat people (1942), the entity (1982), the haunting (1963), dans ma peau (2002), kissed (1996), let’s scare jessica to death (1971), the night of the hunted (1980), daddy’s deadly darling (1972), hausu (1977), lisa lisa (1974), der fan (1982), the witch who came from the sea (1976), the living dead girl (1982), thirst (2009), possession (1981), suspiria (1977), the beyond (1981), raw (2016), daughters of darkness (1971), dumplings (2004), the demon (1963), cathy’s curse (1977), taste of fear (1961), messiah of evil (1973), symptoms (1974), absentia (2011), starry eyes (2014), bug (2006), the iron rose (1973), lake mungo (2009), the grapes of death (1978), night of death (1980), the birds (1963), alice sweet alice (1976), the long hair of death (1980), the house on sorority row (1982), alucarda (1977), kitchen sink (1989), a nightmare on elm street (1984), a tale of two sisters (2003), images (1972), may (2002), femmine carnivore (1970), dark water (2002), phenomena (1985), one missed call (2003), the slumber party massacre (1982), blood and roses (1960), the psychic (1977), ms .45 (1981), hotel (2004), full circle (1977), macabre (1980), vampyres (1974), lisa and the devil (1973), the house that cried murder (1973), succubus (1968), i walked with a zombie (1943), tomie (1999), the seventh victim (1943), the obscene mirror (1973), all the colors of the dark (1972), the girl who knew too much (1963), daughters of fire (1978), the diabolical dr. z (1966), the perfume of the lady in black (1974), evil dead trap 2 (1991), dream demon (1988), folies meurtrières (1984), fatal frame (2014), the queen of black magic (1979).

Lemongrass in the Summer Sun. Just as bare feet dance so beautifully on the browns of the earth. A water hose then becomes the plaything of two people. Laughing Laughter that can still be heard.