Merry Christmas from Siyu

I wish you a very merry Christmas, a happy holiday, and a day with loved ones and friends.  I asked Masqueraderie what they wanted from Santa (Siyu Claus?) and most loved the idea of snowy antlers.  So I'm happy to offer a gift to you that you can wear all winter long.

After having so much trouble getting myself to work, antlers were a delightfully simple and joyful thing to make.  These are mesh, but resizeable and moveable.  The snow on top is a separate object, so if you like, you can turn the snow transparent and wear them as normal antlers all year 'round.

You can pick these up in the notice history of Masqueraderie, which has no entry fee.  Merry Christmas, I hope these give you joy!

Runes, Chains and Dreamcatchers

My constant companion, life partner and always encouraging man has had one thing on top of his "things to make Siyu do" list for a while. There are things that he has on there which involve rescuing old projects that are sitting, waiting for attention, and things that he'd personally like to see me do, but there's one he's always bugging me about. "Decorate your horns! People will seriously love them, I'll love them! Make them!". So after Corvus & Columba, he hijacked me and would not let me create anything else at all until I'd worked on embellishing my horns, and had finished them. Since I'd already put it off before, I had no choice!

A couple of my friends suggested I carve runes into my horns, to give it an infernal or mystic look. I actually had a lot of fun going back into Zbrush and doodling on these, all of the little runes and designs were drawn on carefully, and I invented a couple of symbols. Each horn has a different design, symmetry in this case didn't look so good and it gave me a chance to do more doodles! These are available on all of the ram's horn styles. I considered putting them on to the Ibex horns but there wasn't enough surface area to really make them clear.

After an informal survey of customers and Masqueraderie, it seemed that most people had at least one style of my ram's horns on their favorites list. Nivicola in particular seemed to be well loved, and since its one of my favorite shapes as well I made the following specifically for Nivicola, designed and built around its eldritch curve.

I got it into my head that the curve of a ram's horn would be the perfect place to have a dream catcher. After sketches and a few failed attempts, I set about the mangling and abusing of an oblong sculpt. It drove me crazy, I spent hours and hours tweaking and pinching and straightening and then scrapping whole chunks of it, just to start over again. Lots of frustration, lots of sweat, (but that might have been because the AC was on low) and general pain. I dropped it for weeks but my man wouldn't let me forget it entirely. Finally, when all of the cords were satisfactory, textured, and fitting on the horn, I experimented with beads but scrapped them because I was so ready to be done. After a break, and feeling the finish line was finally close, I made some new beads and stones and of course they look wonderful. They're finally just right.

Do I even need to say that these are my favorite? And not just because these were the ones that came most easily once I finally got over not having a design in mind. I should have known that just lining up chains would make my mystic gypsy muse giggle.

I really love these, especially the delicately hanging crystals. The other side is asymmetrical and has its own arrangement of chains, you'll just have to see the demo to see the effect. They use the sumptuous stones that Elessia and Orinthia have, along with the same choices of metals and horns as always.

Seeing the final results, I have to thank him. There was a lot of frustration, long and arduous work and far too many times I just was simply not in the mood to work on these... Things just dragged on and took so much longer than usual. I had a lack of inspiration, a blocked muse, and the fount of my creativity was plugged. However, with the help of him, friends, and even my mother offering me suggestions, concepts, and encouragement I worked through the spoiled brat that is my self discipline to finish these. Hopefully he'll be right in the end that you guys will love them... but I'm not going to let him do it again! I like my creative suffering to be my own damn fault XD

Ovis Horns

My collection of horns has a glaring omission. I've been missing a truly spectacular pair of ram's horns that makes you want to reach out and touch them. I'm lucky enough to have touched a wild mountain goat's horns (they were very comfortable around tourists, no I didn't feed it) and I wasn't willing to release something that didn't remind me of that warm dry roughness under my fingertips. I was finally able to evoke that memory :)


I had a very specific vision in mind for how I wanted the texture to be, the amount of shine, the delicate ripples, the bumps and crags and cracks and roughness while still having a polished health to them. It took me forever, carefully modeling the high definition horn to follow the ripples and growth rings of a real horn, adding bumps and wear and tear on them and then finding the right amount of shine, but I finally did it. And now that I've made the perfect pair of ram's horns, I might as well make a few more!

Ovis Nivicola is the "snow sheep" of Siberia, and theyhave beautifully curved horns that frame their faces. I took some liberties with the shape to evoke the same frame, and these are one of my favorites. Perfect for demons!

Ovis Aries is one of those classic ram's horns that are probably what you first think of, they're lighter and not as thick as the Canadensis and so less likely to result in a headache.
The Dallis sheep has a more open horn, which also looks sharper than other mountain sheep. I love these as faun horns, I shrunk them down and put on my faun hooves and I felt like skipping around through the woods with a pan pipe.

They all have the same collection of horn colors and metals you should be plenty familiar with now, and I would definitely suggest you grab some demos to see how you like them. Currently, they're only available at my booth at the Accessories Fair, and you should swing by anyway and grab the freebie I put out :) It's a simple choker for women with a texture change stone.

Shoes & Accessories Hunt

I've decided to try out participating in one of those new fangled hunt thingers you young people are always yammering on about. And I'm jumping in with both feet, since the SAH is HYOOOGE! Or at least it is to me, apparently some jaded and delusional folks are saying it's a "modest" hunt with a mere 164 stores participating.

I'm not sure what I can expect from this considering I'm store #150, and I personally can't imagine anyone actually going to every single store and wanting to spend time at them. So I guess I have to set out a particularly appetizing gift to get people in here!

I made some cute little ram's horns, and I've been wearing them around for a week or so now. They didn't fit in with my ridged horn release so I've decided to let you guys have them. Even if you don't feel like doing the hunt, this one is on me guys :)

Now you just have to find them! They'll be hidden inside an alpha picture of a yellow boot. The clue I gave the hunt coordinators was this: "Someone was climbing on the columns". I tried so hard to think of something more clever and romantic (oo a haiku! or maybe a sonnet!) but my hiding spot is so unremarkable the wellspring of my poetic mind ran dry from boredom. So I guess if you're reading this you get an extra clue!

Nature's Headgear

When I see a nature show and they feature gazelle, impala or ibex, I always appreciate the artistry in the sculpting hands of evolution/god/spaghetti monsters. It's unavoidable though that my thoughts should always wander to "damn, that's some frickin' awesome headgear". Some of them are just equipped with the most exquisite racks of lovely curving horns, the likes of which demons only dream of.

So since making my Christmas antlers got me in the mood to make horns, my days of fruitless envy are done and gone, for I made myself some frickin' awesome headgear :D

The ibex is a type of wild mountain goat, who, as you might have guessed, has awesome horns. The ridges and character and roughness of them is simply inspiring. For these, I did a whole new set of textures (but with the same familiar options as the others) to reflect the unique character of them. I also used oblong sculpts to try to cram as much of the actual shape of the ridges as I could. Thankfully, they were quite versatile and allowed me to honor a few other gloriously ridgey horned animals.

The Capra Sibirica (Siberian Ibex) is another goat with amazing horns, so huge you really have to wonder how they don't fall over when they stand up. These are actually smaller than their horns, you can certainly make them larger if you like but I didn't want to give my avatar a headache.

Aepyceros Melampus is the scientific name of the impala (not the car). These are my favorite, they have a beautiful lyrate curve that's flattering and exotic, and are possibly more aerodynamic for superior highway fuel performance.

At first glance you might not be able to tell the difference between these and the Aepyceros, but if you try the demos you'll see they both have a distinctive character. The Gazella are a bit more aggressive and streamlined, which might reflect well on their namesake. Not sure if gazelles are aggressive, no one ever comes back from safari saying they got attacked by one. Though admittedly that might be because no one wants to come back from a safari and say that out of all of the dangerous animals they saw, they got attacked by a gazelle.

Anyway, these are all out at the main store :) You can nab them for 125L each, and you can grab the demos out of the notices for Masqueraderie or at the store.

Keep a light with you

It's not often I can grant a wish, but sometimes I do come through.

Skin by Tuli, Dress by Evie's Closet

Keep a light with you this solstice, but stay far away from the smoke alarm.

Last year I released a pair of antlers so fabulous, they had to be limited so they could be coveted and worshiped as they deserved. Yet all through the year I've been asked about them, and I've been biding my time until the solstice to give them an heir.

These are by no means as epic or awe-inspiring as the Odocoleinae Lumina, I mean for starters you can actually see yourself in frame when you take a picture of them. But they are beautiful, regal, elegant and distinctive, as well as festive in their own right. Drips of wax hang down from the angular reaches of the antlers and get in your hair, and the delicate flickers of glowing flames illuminate your way so you don't need a flashlight. These are scripted to change the antler's texture as always, but they also change the texture of the candles to black, silver, or dark brown wax. You can easily turn the actual candle light off or on through the menu as well.

These are not limited, they're a permanent addition to my antlers collection, so you can breath a sigh of relief that you have time to nab them. If you missed the Odocoleinae Lumina, you can still have these :) And they're 375L, as opposed to the 1750L of the limited edition.

If you're a purist and the candles aren't your thing, or maybe you're a bit short on cash, the plain ones are also available for 250L :)

Men can totally wear girl's hair (hair by Maitreya)

These are available now at Carnivale

Festive Florissinae

Since I released them last year, my antlers have been one of the items I see most often when I'm walking around or browsing fashion blogs. I love the whimsical quality they can add to avatars and they can make a perfectly realistic outfit have a taste of wild fantasy. Antlers are just visually delicious, and I really can't get enough of them.

So I've finally returned to well-trodden ground which I think a lot of people were hoping I would, and created a completely new set utilizing my freshly developed oblong sculpt skillz.


Inspired by Allegory Malaprop (Schadenfreude) and her own curly antlers, I got her blessing to create my own rendition. Taste wise, she and I cover a lot of the same ground. Florissinae isn't an actual genus of deer obviously, if it ever was they would have been hunted down long ago for their awesome headgear. Just like the previous antlers, these are texture change to twelve different lovely options.

The entire reason I made these, though, was that curly antlers are fabulous for decorating with baubles. I've been wanting to make properly decorated holiday antlers for a couple years now and the time was finally right!


These... are so much fun to play with. The antlers themselves are scripted to change, but so are the decorations! I owe a shout out to Sobriquet Kryakutnoy, for without him you would have no Multi option (shown). I would have had to make them a whole separate pair of antlers or something, so major kudos to him. Aside from the festive multi-color version, you can play with having white lights and blue ornaments, red lights and red ornaments, green, white, whatever! There are twelve options to play with to make these antlers incredibly versatile, which makes them awesome to wear through the whole month and not only on those days you feel like wearing the classic red and green.


The gorgeous and talented Evangeline Miles kindly demonstrated this in a few pictures on her plurk ♥

Edited to add: And Ann Launay struts her stuff with her favorite, the cyan ornaments with white tips: http://www.sluniverse.com/snapshots/425392.png

They're available now at the store, and as always you can grab a scripted demo to give them a test drive :)

Ltd Ed: Odocoleinae Lumina

I haven't been really that Christmassy lately, even in my first life I only just put up my tree when it was ten days to go! People are sending out red and white things like mad, Santa is everywhere, all the TV shows are on their Christmas breaks and I'm... well... hmm.

I'm not Jewish, nor am I pagan, yet I'm very appreciative of the darkness of the winter solstice. On the solstice of course is the shortest day of the year, only a few hours of daylight before the longest night of the year. Many cultures have traditions revolving around keeping light through the long night. So being in the mood that I am to make antlers, I decided to make a way to keep a light with you while the night is at its longest.


On your head, of course. Beautiful drippy wax to fall into your hair, and bright dancing fire to catch your holiday decor aflame with. But seriously, I've been wanting to (and Selos has been nagging me to) make these ever since I first started working on antlers. They are also my first limited run item evar, since I felt they were a little too special and unique to be a normal release. I wasn't sure if I was even going to release the plain Odocoleinae so you can imagine how I feel about these.

After running into trouble with a lot of people being unhappy and upset at my limited number editions (the Gods of Illusions masks), I decided to never again do a limited number release. Too many people IM to ask and beg and then turn away sad and defeated that the mask they covet they can't have. So this is my first try at a limited run piece, and depending on how this goes there might be more unique things on the horizon.

I've included a copy of no transfer plain antlers with them, which is one of the reasons I told the folks who love them to hold off a bit if you were interested in the limited ones :) I've priced them at 1750L, and they'll be on sale until midnight SLT on January 1st. They still have the copy or transfer option, which is something I played with changing. I kind of like the idea of only the people who were there being able to have a pair, yet I realized people will want to give them as gifts or even hoard multiple copies and resell them much later. In that way, they might be a little less exclusive, but I hope everyone will be happy.

Oh, there's a built in light in order to get the proper candlelit glow; that picture was taken at the midnight setting with no other lights. Because of this, to get the best look I definitely suggest you don't wear a face light with them, or check and make sure your hair doesn't have any included lights in it either. They also look best with glow, as the candle flames are stationary prims and the glow gives it all of their flicker. But of course you can just try a demo and see how you feel about them, you don't have to take it from me ;)

Odocoleinae

I've been working on a slightly seekrit project, and then realized that what I was making has to be released on it's own, it's too awesome to be limited.

The Heorot antlers are an eighteen point buck antler. It's frankly unreal, really. Most of the largest, oldest bucks have about twelve to fourteen points (prongs, the sticky up things on the antlers), and a twelve point buck is known as a "royal" buck. A fourteen point buck is known as an "imperial".

What the hell would these be known as?
Odocoleinae is the genus known as the "new world deer". They're the moose, the white tailed deer, and the largest breeds that have the most marvelous and sought after antlers. Obviously there is no deer-ish name for just "epic awesome". I wasn't even sure if I was going to sell these. I realized when I first put them on that the people able to wear these are few and far between. Me, Selos, and of course the incomparable Swirly Cyclone can all pull these off but... who else on the grid could be fabulous enough to wear these?

It was Swirly who convinced me to just put them out. After all, how will my answer ever come unless I can see them out in the world being loved.



I'm planning a limited edition version of these, only available for a week or so. So if you're on a tight budget, save your pennies :)

Reindeer Antlers!

Everyone is looking to adorn themselves with something festive! What better than the headgear that is universally feared by pets and small children. All you need is a little red nose (not included)





I prefer to allow you to be your own reindeer. It's no fun to be Rudolph, working late on Christmas eve with a radioactive facial tumor. Best to be your own.

The Magnificent Horn Post, Prt 2

Alright, so the thing that started it all to make me remake all those textures were the aforementioned antlers. Aaaah beautiful antlers that I delighted in taunting you with. But, I also realized that while small horns are cute and lovely, sometimes it's a lot of fun to wear big demonic or primal ones.

To start with, a cute pair of horns I was going to make one of the 100L expression ones, but I actually forgot to take a picture of it and so I lost that perfect camera angle. I also realized these were harder to do and more complex... so they're a whole 20L more, oh noes!

Cernwn is the Welsh name for "Cernunnos", who is a Celtic god often associated with horned animals, and ram horns. But he took on his own life in Wiccan and neo-pagan mythology, becoming more than just a ram headed snake and became the "Lord of the Wild Things", which is why I devoted another pair of horns to him.

Mmmm feel the manliness! He's commonly referred to as just "The Lord" in neo-pagan rituals, and is normally invoked to represent the forces of masculinity.

"Ba'al" is actually just a Hebrew word for master, or lord, so there are many Hebrew gods who ended up falling into the name, including some humans who were in positions of power. Most commonly though, Baal applies to a cultist image of a false god. He isn't depicted particularly with horns... but looking at them the name came to me. Some fun trivia, the term "Beelzebub" is actually a pun, based off of "Baal Zebul", which means "Lord Prince" and was an honored and divine title. "Baal Zebub" means "Lord of the Flies" which was a term that was coined to mock the followers of Baal Zebul and later evolved into a term for the devil.

Baphomet was actually a badly garbled name for Muhammad.. that was some crazy telephone game up from the Crusades, huh? He isn't normally depicted with these types of horns, due to a very famous drawing by Levi, but I was having enough trouble thinking of horned gods as it was :P But, I had to make a special set of horns especially for Herne.

Herne the Hunter was a ghost of English folklore, who's roughly based on Cernunnos but is based off of a story of King Richard II of England. The story goes that on a hunting trip, Herne accompanied the king where he cornered a white stag, but the stag attacked the king, and Herne sacrificed himself to save him. According to legend, he was brought back to life by a wizard who made Herne wear the antlers of the stag as a part of the ritual. In exchange, he lost his ability to hunt, and he was hung by the King's other hunstmen for keeping the loot to himself.

Yeeeaah... well... avoid huntsmen and kings and you should be ok wearing these, I hope. Let me know if you end up in any oak trees.

These horns aren't actually what I'd call antlers, only antler inspired...those are still to come ;)

The Magnificent Horn Post, Prt 1

Like the soda that you drink and leaves an ache in your tummy, I had an enormous burp of creations I had to release before my cramp would go. I have had a few sets of antlers done since April, and a lot of people have been feeling taunted and teased by them. However, I refused to release them until I was happy with them, because that's what I do! The textures were absolutely unsatisfactory, and no matter what I did I couldn't seem to get them to the point where I wanted them.

Beware, there are four posts in this epic release, so settle in, get a drink and munch on some popcorn or something.

Well, I finally broke through that about a week ago. Since then, I've been working non-stop, making and upgrading horns and horny accessories. So to start off and show off the new textures a bit, and since this is a monstrous release (hehe), part one of this batch is going to be the remade horns I released over a year ago. These are all horns you've seen before, but I'm posting them because I just love the pictures. Each name is a verb, which can conveniently be expressed through a facial expression.

(Grrrrrrr!)

(Tehehe)

(What's that over there?!)

(Hrumph)
(Ooo gonna nom some skittles)
(You ate my skittles!? GRRRRRR!)

Obviously I had a ridiculous amount of fun playing with how I could use and combine the Linden default facial emotions to get fun effects. I also had a lot of fun seeing all those simple, cute, and adorable horns again. I realized I should make a few more and make it a nice block of nine. Which meant I could take more pictures! Hehehe >:D

(Nrmph!)

(Nyaarrr!)
Unlike the old horns, these all change texture to a selection of twelve different ones. Gold, silver and copper are all included as well as black, white, gray, bone, bleached bone, polished bone, light tipped, white tipped and dark tipped. This has made my job much easier, as well as serving as a fatpack, which is why the prices for the horns has gone up to 100L per from 45L. I think you'll agree that that's a fine compromise :)

I took all of these pictures with Selos' Heart skin, even though I ended up not showing off her scalp tattoo at least you still get to enjoy the makeup!

I've also started using an updated version of Miriel's vendors, which passes you a folder rather than a box for your object folder. What this means is I won't need to use boxes, which saves you having to unpack your things and saves me a lot of time on more complex releases.

More coming up in Prt 2 :)

The Magnificent Horn Post, Prt 3

Hahaha, I can't stop doing it, I always am such a tease with my glorious antlers. But I might as well finally scratch your itch and reveal my cards.

Most of the names of these are subgenuses of Cervidae, which is the sort of "deer" category.

A Sika is an east Asian deer, whose antlers were commonly used for medicinal purposes in Japan and China. They are very hard to hunt, as they are extremely clever and tenacious, and a single rifle shot will very rarely take them down. To my knowledge, they tend to have smaller antlers than other deer, but this is based on me looking at pictures :)~

Cervinae is the genus of "Old world deer" or "true deer". These are extremely classic, iconic deer antlers. They'd be found on any red deer or white tailed deer... except females obviously :P Not in my reality of course, girls can totally wear antlers! After all, where else could you have such a large, glorious and attention grabbing rack?
Seriously, who could keep their eyes off of a rack like that? Excuse me, my eyes are DOWN HERE.

Anyway, a "heorot" is the old English root for "hart", which is a stag. A heorot more specifically is a red deer male who has reached five years or older. The older a stag gets, the more glorious his antlers can grow, because they don't always fall off during the mating seasons.


I don't have much to say about this one, except to just say... watch out for Sarah Palin.

Horsies!

I've been more busy than it seems recently! Just these items required a lot more effort and time on my part than most. Creature masks always do! Which creature? Well, I gave that away in the post title.

OMG now you TOO can be a pretty poneh! And be the type of horsie that wears fuzzy sweaters and a tanktop. I especially like wearing this mask with Riann Maltese's satyr legs and crazy big hair from Naughty or Aden Breyer. I took special care to make the shape as expressive and realistic as possible, and it's more forgiving with hair styles than most of my more complicated masks. Still, try the demo to make sure you really want to be a pretty horsie.

When I asked the Fashion Consolidated Cafe what color they always wanted their ponies when they were little girls, unfailingly everyone said pink and purple. I was going to be a stickler and only include real horse colors, but I realized what fun was that? If the people want pink and purple ponies, who am I to deny that! Speaking of, check out this add on:

Oddly, unicorn horns seem to be in demand, and have been asked about a few times. Since my original Horse Mask was actually a Unicorn Mask, I wanted to honor it with having an optional horn that could be worn on a separate attachment point. Yes, it's sculpted, and I love it, it's very pretty. Best part is, it doesn't require any special fitting to stick to either your forehead or the mask, it works either way! It's available in my 5 metallic colors of gold, copper, and the three silver shades, as well as bone, black, and white.

This may not quite fit in, I was tempted to make another blog post for it but eh, might as well consolidate.

After some experimenting in Zbrush, I found a way to build things right onto the SL avatar. It doesn't work very well the way I'm doing it, but it worked well enough for me to make a skin tight head cap that fit to the scalp. Well, after doing this of course I wanted to make a mask out of it, and that inevitably became this:

Sexy, no? My worry is that it's actually too sexy for my modest, PG 13 sim. But then I found myself dressing up in thigh high boots, Nicky Ree's Justice League outfit, and fighting crime... and realized the real crime would be in denying people the fun of being a Catwoman super hero type person! It includes the posture collar, which comes with a simple ao pose to keep the neck straight and avoid the avatar mesh from poking through the sides. Since it's modifiable, if this bothers you or messes with your AO, you can just delete it and let your neck go freestyle.


Coming soon: BIG HAIR!

Hornariffictastic!

As was the assumed, and somewhat inevitable result of my success at mirroring sculpted prims... here they are. Delicious, wicked, mischievous and silly: HORNS

I'll just say that after Kala Bijoux (the genius behind Material Squirrel) told me how to make them mirrored, the next hardest thing was naming them. I decided to name them after what it sort of made me feel like doing while wearing them, and so all of the names are various verbs! With these names came some adorable pictures. There are 7 types of horns, all available for 45L each, so get ready for picture overload!!






Needless to say.... I had a lot of fun doing these pictures. And the horns, naturally, but the pictures top it all off so cutely! All of these horns can be shrunk, but I made them a size that they stand out from moderate-to-fluffy hair. I've made them in these five loverly materials:


Personally, I don't see why anyone would ever buy anything other than the black horns, but that's just me. Sometimes you need some contrast going, I'll admit!

I also put a heading in under neath the "sculpted horns" description as you can see, saying "Stretch 'Em, Squash 'Em, Smush 'Em!" and I really mean it! I mean it so much, that I detailed out a huge long note card explaining how to customize them, set behind this board right here:

This is the first board I've ever done like this, using screenshots rather than snap shots, and I'm really happy with how official I've managed to pretend to be! Wow, don't I look professional!


(In a fun way)