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