Diarchy

Woohoo, at last I can post these! I am so super excited to finally have this project completed and ready to share with everyone. This was a joint project between me and my sister, the lovely and talented Vor4, and has been in progress for... damn, I don't even remember anymore. Like two years or something. Definitely more than one year, anyway. Suffice to say it is time-consuming doing a meatspacey art collaboration when the people involved live on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

Originally I intended to hold off on posting until I found necklace chains for them, but I wasn't having much luck in my quest, since I'm way too picky. I found lots of options in one colour or the other, but never matching pairs of one in silver and the other in gold. Still keeping an eye out, of course, or might braid cords for them one day, but I got too impatient to finally get these pendants uploaded, so here they are at last.

Okay really they've been done for a few days but I had to deal with the usual "photographing shiny things that also glow WHYYY" that I swear I'm going to figure out one of these days because shiny shit and glow-in-the-dark shit is like 90% of what I'm making lately, and then I spent way too many hours putting together the collage with at least two of those hours spent dicking around with the background colours and making my own custom gradients, and after that was sleep time, and then right before posting it I found a little screwup in my collage that I had to go fix because even if no one else cared or noticed I would know it was there.

*BREATHE*

Alright, so, yes, a set of matched necklace pendants depicting the cutie marks of Princesses Luna and Celestia. Or maybe it's more Nightmare Moon since Luna's cutie mark looks closer to black clouds/spots on blue instead of purple on black, but I only had a black stone so TOUGH SHIT YOU GET PURPLE. It's metallic and kinda glittery.

The engraving and painting was my part, and Vor4 did the metalwork and stone-setting. I engraved and painted them, then shipped them to my sister. We sent bail design ideas back and forth for a bit (fun times getting together over Skype when there's a six-hour time difference), and then she made those once I'd decided on roughly what I was looking for. She got the materials and put the bails together, then sent them back to me, whereupon I added the glowing bit to the Luna pendant and then took a bajillion photos trying to get a good shot of the pieces.

The Lunar pendant is hematite, and goddamn did engraving that thing really drive home the reason why its name derives from the Greek word for blood. RED DUST EVERYWHERE. The engraving is coloured in with metallic purple paint and white UV-reactive/glow-in-the-dark powder and clear varnish. Yes, the Luna pendant glows in the dark. The photo showing the glow is with a blacklight shining on it, but once it's charged up the active glow looks pretty much the same. The bail is made of sterling silver with a tube-set blue sapphire.

Dimensions incl. bail: 5cm long, 3cm wide, 0.85cm thick at the bail (stone is 0.45cm thick). No idea on exact weight, but it's hematite so it's pretty hefty.

The Solar pendant is (probably) quartz, or something vaguely quartz-like (I got these stones from a grab-box of assorted rocks; I don't know for sure what half of them are). None of the available hues of paint came close to screen accuracy, so I had to mix them up myself to get what I needed. This pendant does not glow in the dark because a) I didn't have yellow or orange glow powder, and b) if the Sun was glowing at night it would actually be daytime and glow-in-the-dark things would be pointless and invisible. The bail is made of 10k gold and set with a pink tourmaline.

Dimensions incl. bail: 5cm long, 3.5cm wide, 1cm thick at the bail (stone is 0.53cm thick). Weight-wise I am again unsure.
Time Spent: WHO EVEN KNOWS I sure don't.

Tools & Materials: Pieces of hematite and quartz, MLP:FiM wiki for references, computer, printer, printer paper, clear packing tape, craft knife or maybe it was an old box-cutter blade IDR, permanent marker, Dremel w/ flex-shaft, diamond engraving burrs -- mostly various diameters of round but some cylindrical too, water, paint thinner, dental picks, scrubby pumice soap, porcelain paint, plastic container lids for paint-mixing trays, white glow powder, clear varnish, baking sheet, kitchen oven, piece of silver-grey fabric, my evil genius chair, camera, GorillaPod tripod, GIMP to composite the above collage, bubble wrap and envelope and stamps to send things to my sister, who presumably used: sapphire, tourmaline, sterling silver sheet, 10k gold sheet, rulers, drills, saws, files, flux, hard solder, soldering torch, polishing compound and possibly a whole bunch of other stuff but you'd have to ask her for an itemized breakdown of what got used when and where.

I may have repeated myself a bunch up there or forgot a bunch of info completely, and probably rambled on incoherently for more than was entirely necessary. It's late again and I'm tired.

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These are for sale. $375 CAD for the pair, plus shipping. They are intended as a matched set and I will not split them up. Note me if interested.