Today I Learned About The Spanish Moon Moth, They're So Pretty + Look Like Stained Glass Windows

Strzyga

Region of origin: Poland

Female vampiric spirits that can assume the form of an owl and hunt people who dared wander into their forests at night. It was thought strzyga were the result of a person born with two souls, with only one soul able to move on to the afterlife after their passing the other soul becoming stuck in the dead body, returning from the grave as the ghoulish creature. It was thought the second soul manifested as the person having multiple body parts, such as two hearts or a second set of teeth, and anyone thought to possess these qualities may be buried with the corpse’s head removed to prevent the strzyga from rising.

Vanadinite

Pb5(VO4)3Cl

Locality:

Old Yuma Mine (Yuma Mine), Saguaro National Monument, Amole District, Tucson Mts, Pima Co., Arizona, USA

Field of View: 5 mm

Natural History Museum Prague’s Photo

Soft sculpture by UniversesSwirls on Etsy

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Resource: Map-Making Brushes/Icons

Here’s another resource courtesy of my D&D campaign planning! I decided to put together some Photoshop brushes to make map creation easier, since I have a crapton of maps to make. The above example is still a somewhat rough work in progress, but it gives you a decent idea of what you can do with the brushes. Once I had the outline drawn, it only took about ten minutes to fill in most of the geography and other details (naming things admittedly took much longer lol).

Each brush in the set is hand-drawn by me, so they work well if you’re looking to quickly create a digital map that still has an old-fashioned look. They’re also hi-res enough to use with maps that you plan to print out, as that was my original intent when I made them for myself.

These could work nicely with the world map template I made last month— I used them to trace over a generated map to give it a hand-drawn feel that was more in line with a Dungeons & Dragons game.

What this download contains:

A set of Photoshop brushes with built in brush settings

A .psd file of the original hand-drawn icons in case you want to edit/remake/etc. anything

A hi-res .png of the icon file in case you don’t have Photoshop or otherwise want to make brushes for another program

The brush/icon pack is available for download here.

As with all my content, this is a free resource, but if you find it helpful and have a couple spare bucks lying around, please consider making a small donation to help keep this blog running and creating original content!

Hand carved Chinese dark red jade group figure of wild horses. Each horse is finely carved with high detail. Breathtaking translucence to this deep red jade. 19th century.

lets make a videogame how hard can it be

Surrealist Garden Las Pozas in México

“Magic happens at Las Pozas. Just like in work by Salvador Dalí, at Las Pozas art portrays one thing as another, invents a reality put in place of conventional, official, socially acceptable reality. More than painting a picture or sculpting an object, they produced an atmosphere, a privileged place.” ~ Irene Herner

Nestled in the thick jungles of San Luis Potosí, Mexico, Edward James discovered the perfect setting for staging his life’s masterpiece. A surrealist labyrinth unfolds amid waterfalls and ponds—natural and man-made—that prepare the mind for immersion into a dream world. With buildings that evoke nonsense, doors leading nowhere, stairways to the sky and concrete flowers that sprout beside real ones, one man’s dreams are realized and reality is displaced by fantasy.

Images via text via

Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) is a pair of residential towers in the Porta Nuova district of Milan, Italy, between Via Gaetano de Castillia and Via Federico Confalonieri near Milano Porta Garibaldi railway station. They have a height of 110 metres (360 ft) and 76 metres (249 ft) and will host more than 900 trees (approximately 550 and 350 trees in the first and second towers respectively) on 8,900 square metres (96,000 sq ft) of terraces. Within the complex is also an 11-story office building; its facade does not host plants.

The towers were designed by Boeri Studio (Stefano Boeri,Gianandrea Barreca and Giovanni La Varra). It also involved input from horticulturalists and botanists. (Source)

Early Medieval pattern-welded Sickle

Reconstruction by Thorkil

The sickle was based on an antler sickle case found in Stargard Szczecinski, West Pomerania (Poland). The original was richly decorated with geometrical motives, popular at that time. Thorkil’s version is a very faithful reconstruction of it, with all circles, dots, triangles and lines made on natural deer antler.

The decoration was hand engraved, then coloured with natural dark dye for a contrast and stronger effect. The sickle blade’s is pattern-welded (damascus) steel. It was hand forged (in charcoal fire) of 20 twisted layers. The cutting edge was forge-welded to pattern-welded part.

Source: Copyright © 2017 Thorkil

— Pavana पवन