With Samhain nearing, and a website that had to be put down assailed by nonsense, thoughts turned toward tombstones.

so I first found a nice patch of grass for public growing, and after watching Norm Abram build up a nice fireplace mantle I figured I had all the tools for cutting pixels that he's got for woodworking, so might as well do it myself, and out of granite! actually "cut" (well, CSG differenced out) the type finally, and I made my difference. cleaned up skullobj.pov so it doesn't have that ovoid Giger Alien-y braincase anymore along the way. and c'mon, I'm gonna lean a tire on that, need some spoke shadows to take my mind off of the endless possibilities for cloud coverage techniques. want to get a tallbike or few in in the wayoff...

The simplest objects can sometimes be the toughest to render. Instead of making a safety pin from a twisted piece of alloy wire and a stamped and folded piece of plate, try three half-torii (rotated the correct amount) joined wih two giant torus arcs for the pin, and a conglomeration of half discs, cylinders, and a quarter disc all cut by another big cylinder to fashion the clasp. Yikes.

Some claim the safety pin "magnificent."

With all kinds of metal textures to create objects from, and a macro by Marc Schimmler, brass nuts couldn't be resisted.

Unfortunately, Mr. Schimmler's websites are no longer?

Need some gates to keep Hell closed? Electrons are a lot more cost-effective, tidy, and speedy than plaster, wood, or brass. And once it's built from a simple bunch of boxes it's easy to play with light sources and get the shadows falling just so.

This was finally rendered at an insane size to produce a 300 dpi 8½" wide image, the basis of some T-shirt artwork.