Accursed fallen angel rock of the day: Seraphinite
Seraphinite is beautiful stuff. It was discovered relatively recently so it's not all that common in shops, but it makes beautifully patterned polished stones for jewellry. The reason it's called Seraphinite is because the patterns resemble wings, in gloriously gleaming shades of green and silver. Yes, like recent features pietersite and chaoite it's another chatoyant rock, and a complete bitch. Satan was a fallen angel; I think this is his favourite stone.
Here's a photo of my original tumbled stone, taken with the usual camera on macro mode:
See the wings? Ain't it pretty?
Also as usual I couldn't get many pixels, and had the usual problems with curves and reflections but it seemed so tantalisingly gorgeous I couldn't wait to get a slab of the stuff and have a better go. It took a while to get a piece but in the end I was quite lucky and got a large unpolished slab from Russia for only about 3x what I paid for a single tumbled specimen at retail. Compared to the prices I've seen for finished jewellry, an absolute stonking bargain.
Trying to get a picture with the camera was impossible. Even unpolished this stuff is so reflective there was no kind of lighting that I could get to look good. To be precise, the reflective bits alternated with non-reflecting bits. Enter the microscope. Insert sounds of gnashing teeth. Those fine feathery structures just don't replicate well down to the scale at which my microscope works, so I struggled to find the images I was expecting. To give the colours a chance I had to immerse the whole slab in water and sacrifice focus, because it simply wouldn't stay wet.
Interesting soft texture, at least.
Tonight I tried a microscope slide cover and was sadly disappointed once again. I looked back and found that rather to my surprise the best results I ever got were with the dry stone. First time that's ever happened, but you live and learn. I may not have found feathers, but there are still interesting things to see:
...and I reckon I've found a good source of more van Gogh brushwork:
I took so many test shots hunting my winged white whale I have not one but two contact sheets of thumbnails. And these are just the survivors!
These show the results of a couple of different techniques:
I haven't quite figured out what I can do with these yet, but I'm sure it will come to me now I've stopped trying to make them behave. That's part of the fun, after all.
(I do wonder if I can make a workable collage from all my van Gogh rocks but right now the colours are saying no. I should listen to the colours.)
Here's a photo of my original tumbled stone, taken with the usual camera on macro mode:
See the wings? Ain't it pretty?
Also as usual I couldn't get many pixels, and had the usual problems with curves and reflections but it seemed so tantalisingly gorgeous I couldn't wait to get a slab of the stuff and have a better go. It took a while to get a piece but in the end I was quite lucky and got a large unpolished slab from Russia for only about 3x what I paid for a single tumbled specimen at retail. Compared to the prices I've seen for finished jewellry, an absolute stonking bargain.
Trying to get a picture with the camera was impossible. Even unpolished this stuff is so reflective there was no kind of lighting that I could get to look good. To be precise, the reflective bits alternated with non-reflecting bits. Enter the microscope. Insert sounds of gnashing teeth. Those fine feathery structures just don't replicate well down to the scale at which my microscope works, so I struggled to find the images I was expecting. To give the colours a chance I had to immerse the whole slab in water and sacrifice focus, because it simply wouldn't stay wet.
Interesting soft texture, at least.
Tonight I tried a microscope slide cover and was sadly disappointed once again. I looked back and found that rather to my surprise the best results I ever got were with the dry stone. First time that's ever happened, but you live and learn. I may not have found feathers, but there are still interesting things to see:
...and I reckon I've found a good source of more van Gogh brushwork:
I took so many test shots hunting my winged white whale I have not one but two contact sheets of thumbnails. And these are just the survivors!
These show the results of a couple of different techniques:
I haven't quite figured out what I can do with these yet, but I'm sure it will come to me now I've stopped trying to make them behave. That's part of the fun, after all.
(I do wonder if I can make a workable collage from all my van Gogh rocks but right now the colours are saying no. I should listen to the colours.)