The Parlor Renders on YouTube

A short little video of Mayfair Witches house renderings...

The Mayfair Witches' Garden

The flowers are chicory, which is used in Café au lait for its added taste

Lasher Appears

Replacing an earlier video with some of my own family in it with this Mayfair Witches-related video to keep content Mayfair Witches-related, this is the first upload with the new AI feature requirement.

Afternoon In the Haunted Garden of the Mayfair Witches

The Parlor's Dammit Doll

The Mayfair Garden In 3D

Spring is approaching.  One thing I have wanted to do for a long time is do my best to recreate the Mayfair garden in 3D.   I've already built most of the structural elements, the "hardscape".  The pool patio, the balustrades, even the swimming pool...

The smaller buildings on the property appear as they do for the moment as placeholders for the actual buildings around the pool and patio area.  The cabana won't still look like this when I'm done:

This is before I made the patio feature the flagstones it actually does.  And before I added the remaining fountains.  

One thing I've wanted to do with a 3D model of the Mayfair house from the novels is to use the garden as a way of showing the types of flowers, shrubs, trees and other features that are described.   A fun way of identifying what grows there that might also appeal to garden enthusiasts.

The garden itself plays a major role in the stories of the Mayfair Witches.  There is Deirdre's Oak, which is also what marks the graves of (spoiler alert) and Emaleth.  The garden is what Deirdre Mayfair saw every day of her life for so many years, and up until she died.  The side porch is where Deirdre sat in her rocking chair, looking at who knows what and inspiring one local to refer to her as "a nice bunch of carrots". WH Ch 1

Nice.

The garden is where Michael Curry saw Lasher, and where Mona Mayfair found a trash can to use to get through a first floor window into the house to search for Michael.  But the area of the garden that really plays a role is the swimming pool.

It's hard to imagine what is, in reality and real life, a beautiful swimming pool being full of muck for decades and surviving.  I do not know when the actual pool was built on the property, but we can be reasonably sure it was not built by the original owner, Albert Hamilton Brevard.  

In The Witching Hour, the swimming pool was added by Stella Mayfair, whose party guests would often amuse themselves in it.  So, the pool was built in the 1920's, in the novel timeline.  Swimming pools actually scare me somewhat, but I also find them fascinating for some weird reason.

Imagining a swimming pool like this being emptied by shoveling out several decades' worth of muck and then restored is more than a little creepy, I think.  But fascinating.  And definitely a haunted swimming pool.

Michael Curry, during the restoration of the house, decided he'd take a dip one night when he was alone at the house.  And promptly found himself looking at a scene from the past, something that might have been either a time slip or a residual type of haunting.  Seeing a ghostly replay of Stella Mayfair's Roaring Twenties party could certainly be called residual.

But the ghost of Arthur Langtry of the Talamasca, who also died in 1929, standing at one end of the pool and urging Michael to "Come away from there, man!" certainly isn't residual.

Haunted or not, a swimming pool like this in the middle of a garden full of lush, flowering plants would certainly be an enchanting, magical sight to behold.  Hopefully, I can achieve this effect, or come very close.

Speaking of the ghostly replay and the ghost of Arthur Langtry, here is a tidbit from Season 1 of Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches that jumped out at me.  I don't believe I've gone into this much, but why not?

When Rowan was trapped in the Mayfair house after Deirdre's funeral and Carlotta's attempt to burn the house down, she had quite an odyssey.  She and Ciprien Grieve.  Ciprien Grieve found himself making the acquaintance of a man named Stuart Townsend.  And Stuart Townsend had some advice for Ciprien Grieve.

Don't die in the house.

Those who have read The Witching Hour will probably know who Stuart Townsend is.  He was indeed in the novels.  For those who don't know or might not remember, Stuart Townsend also belonged to the Talamasca.  Stella Mayfair was aware of the order, and even had a little fun with them when signing a photograph of herself for them.

By 1929, the sibling rivalry between Stella, the Designee, and Carlotta, the older sister who was originally the Designee until their mother, Mary Beth Mayfair, decided it would be Stella, instead.  Mary Beth Mayfair had died of cancer in 1925, and the relations between the siblings deteriorated alarmingly.

Stella had wanted to get away from her family, and apparently had hoped Stuart Townsend, who had fallen in love with Stella, would help her.  Well, Carlotta did not like that, and the brother, Lionel, was jealous as well.  What happened?  Carlotta tricked Lasher and provoked Lionel into shooting Stella in the double parlor from the main staircase.

Unfortunately, Stella's 8-year-old daughter Antha saw her mother shot to death.

Arthur Langtry was also in the Mayfair house when Stella was killed.  Actually, A LOT of people were in the Mayfair house when Stella was killed.  Because it happened during what would turn out to be her last wild, Roaring Twenties party.  

Langtry was able to leave the Mayfair house to head home, but died on the ship he was traveling on.  Stuart Townsend?

Well, he went "missing".

Kinda.

See, he never left the Mayfair house after Stella was killed.  And he wouldn't leave it for another sixty years.  That was when Stella's great-granddaughter Rowan realized there was a reason that rolled up carpet on the third floor looked funny.

Some of this might sound familiar to those who recall Season 1--except it was Deirdre who was the murder victim rather than Stella (so far).  In the book, Lionel, the actual shooter, was taken to a psychiatric hospital and died soon after, thanks to Lasher tormenting him.  

All of this activity appears to have also caused the haunting to include the swimming pool.  Those familiar with the novels will no doubt recall that when Michael came home and found Lasher "in the flesh", the two of them fought, and Michael ended up drowning and being brought back--again--in the swimming pool.  

No matter how trivial a detail might seem on the face, Anne Rice had a way of integrating it into the stories in the novels she wrote.  Every single thing described about the Mayfair house and all of the items in it has a purpose to the rest of the tale.  While a haunting, blue-green ambience and the sight of moss dripping from branches, descriptions of the china, silver, and crystal found in the butler's pantry and other things might seem pointless on the face, they're not.  Even those things are telling the story. 

It might be more accurate to say it was Lasher, rather than Carlotta, who stopped time at the Mayfair house since 1929.

I'm pretty anxious to finally be at the point where I'm ready to start adding the flowers to the garden...

A Little Mayfair Witches Ambience ASMR-style

The Parlor is trying something new.  It might have been mentioned before, but this new experiment is...ambience.  ASMR-style.

The Mayfair House--A 3D Update

I thought it was time I provided an update on my project, a 3D model of the Mayfair house on First Street.  There are some details I've added, some obvious, some not so obvious.  This update shows only part of the first floor, and there are certainly details I've not gotten to yet.  One is that there appears to be a door or window on the end of the butler's pantry that faces the pool and patio area of the garden.

For More on The Pink Room...

For a little more background on the model of the master bedroom and a few tidbits on the role it plays as a setting in the Lives of the Mayfair Witches series, I've included a little bit in a new addition to this page of the Parlor: Come Into My Parlor In 3D.

The Pink Room: The Master Bedroom

This is REALLY pink everywhere!  Hopefully, I will soon be able to reduce the amount of pink in the master bedroom.  In the meantime, this is the first room on the second floor I've worked on.  Quite a lot of progress on the room has been made already...

For Your Viewing Pleasure...

 Throughout the Parlor, there are videos embedded on pages according to topic.  These videos are on YouTube, as well.  There are also some playlists and videos from other platforms like Vimeo and Behance.  It's pretty amazing how hard it can be to tell what the video's screen resolution, bit rate and stuff is, but many of the Parlor's videos are much larger than what you'd see on YouTube's player.

Rowan Mayfair By the Book

 Sometimes when a TV show or movie makes changes to some of the basic features of a character's physical appearance, it isn't always a bad thing.  One example is Rowan going from blond to brunette from page to screen.  It isn't one of the changes that bothered me too much when it came to Rowan's appearance.  I still wanted to show Rowan as Rowan Mayfair in the novels.  The model I found really did not need much in the way of changes, and even the sunglasses work.  Rowan had purchased some sunglasses on her trip to New Orleans to attend Deirdre's funeral, and they really do make her look glamorous, I think!

The Mayfair Witches in 3D

 

Now that I've been able to build (for the most part) a 3D model of the Mayfair house with interiors that can be shown even while the entire house is incomplete, I'm turning more attention to...the Mayfair Witches themselves! 

I've included this image and some details about its creation on both Come Into My Parlor In 3D and The Face of Come Into My Parlor's Mayfair Witches.  I am working on some other models of the Mayfair Witches alongside the ongoing 1239 First Street in 3D project.  From what I can tell, it looks like the Witches themselves are what people really want to see.  I can't disagree with that!

That is my ultimate goal--to create the Mayfair Witches as Anne Rice described them.  As we begin to look toward a possible Season 2 of Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches on AMC (actual status unknown), I am reminded that reactions to Season 1 were most definitely mixed.  People either really loved it or really hated it.  Some of the most important main characters were missing completely, there were jumps from one plot line to another that made no sense, among other things.  Most of all, there was a diversion from the source material (the novels themselves) that was too much of a diversion and made people ask a number of times, "Did the writers even READ the books?!"

To be fair, The Witching Hour is a long book.  It's challenging to bring a book so long with four different parts to it to the screen, even as a television series.  There is so much material there that I would imagine it's hard to determine what to somehow translate to the screen and what not to.  I don't know; I am not a filmmaker.  

One thing I keep meaning to do is to expand more on the differences between the books and the series so far.  There are some things from the series that I actually loved seeing, because they did give me a new feel for the atmosphere of the settings of the story.  Another was that Suzanne, the village midwife of Donnelaith, Scotland and the first Mayfair Witch, was brought to the screen.  Then, though I was confused about a few details at first, there was the inclusion of the Mayfair Emerald as a literal key.  Which, symbolically speaking, is what the Mayfair Emerald was.

I decided to limit what I included from the series in the model itself.  One thing I did decide to do, since recreating the mural on the walls of the dining room would be a challenge, was to find a suitable panoramic image for the mural.  Also, I would include framed portraits of each of the Mayfair Witches on the walls of the dining room, which is what was done in the AMC series.  

One of the photographs Rowan finds in Ciprien Grieve's cellphone is an old one that appears to have been taken in the 1920's.  Guess who that has to be?  Yes.  Stella.  The novels refer to photos taken of Stella's Roaring Twenties parties in the Mayfair house, including the last party she threw before her murder in the parlor of the house in 1929.  Photos are mentioned again in connection with some pearls and a Victrola once owned by Julien Mayfair.  The photos were also of Stella and others, like Ancient Evelyn as a young woman.

That photo is one you'll no doubt see tucked in somewhere.  The other photos and portraits, such as the ones seen in the opening credits mounted on crumbling walls with twisted branches of the family tree, I think are one of the ways the Mayfair Witches' tale has spanned generations of this family.  Indeed, there is a lot of interest in the Mayfair family tree. 

But let's get back to The Witching Hour.  As stated, it is a long book.  I understand cast members themselves read the books and are longtime fans of Anne Rice.  At the same time, reading a book that long, with so much in it, seems to be something some readers struggle with.  That's not a criticism of them as readers, however.  The book has so much in it that it can be hard to keep the flow of the story in mind while reading.

This might be a bit overdue, but perhaps it's time the Parlor devoted extra space and time to a more detailed discussion of The Witching Hour?  

In fact, I was just reading through parts of it last night when I came across a section I had been meaning to review anyway.  The reason being that I have been working on other parts of the Mayfair house and needed to review details on a few things in it so they will be accurate in the model.  As to what that might be, I'll give you a hint.

It's something that has me doing yet another search to see if I can find architectural details of the second floor of the Mayfair house.  I want to make sure the master bedroom door is in the correct location...

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year from the Parlor!

I've been working on 3D graphics like crazy.  Mostly because I kept having issues, which in turn led to at least one software upgrade and a major cleanup of graphics files.  It's unfortunate that at the moment, I have system limitations that prevent me from creating more of the type of graphics I want to create.  That's a wordy way of saying my laptop is an old fa--older device.

Perhaps I will be able to obtain a more powerful machine that will be able to handle rendering software at some point.  Lumion is one example.  I'm especially anxious to be able to do more because I would love to be able to do even more with 3D models like what is in this animation:

This animation also appears on the Parlor's home page.

In it, you see a 3D model of a woman, a Mayfair Witch.  The image created using AI technology of Charlotte Mayfair provided the textures for the face on the 3D model.  It's not perfect, but it's not exactly finished, either.

The emerald key from the AMC series that she is wearing is a 3D model of it that I also made.  You know, I had to actually draw the symbols freestyle in the 3D software, and it was sooo tedious!  I tried to keep the model as close to the one in the series as possible, and I will improve it as I am able to reproduce other details of the key.  

When I make graphics for the Parlor that include the key, more and more, you will see my 3D model of the key in it.  I have another version with slightly different metal textures that might still be seen here and there.  

I think now that I have made as much progress on the model of the Mayfair house as I have, it is time to begin introducing the characters themselves, including Lasher.  His first appearance is the image of Lasher created by Jennifer Harris for MAYFAIR, and his entry has been made via Tante Oscar's phone, which has been moved from Tante Oscar's fridge to the Mayfair fridge.

What a coincidence--that is the spot in the Mayfair house where Lasher first revealed himself to Rowan.  Lasher had shown himself to Rowan the moment her mother, Deirdre, died and again on the flight from San Francisco to New Orleans for Deirdre's funeral.  But the first time Lasher showed himself to Rowan in the Mayfair house was at pretty much the same spot where we see Lasher pop up from Tante Oscar's iPhone...

This is also one of the rare occasions where you will hear notty werds in the Parlor.  For those of you who don't mind the occasional f-bomb, have a look:

Again...Happy New Year, everyone!

A (Belated) Mayfair Christmas Dinner In 3D

If you read the description of the video, you will see that this particular video is now the single most difficult I have ever made.  Not because Christmas dinners make me cry (they don't), but because of numerous problems with software, which still gave me grief even AFTER I upgraded it. 

Now, I understand that now that it's upgraded, there are some more things it is now capable of doing.  Well, that's good, because the next thing I'm gonna work on is my Dammit Doll, and I'm gonna animate it and it's gonna look great being banged on something somewhere in the 3D house--

Anyway.

Before sitting down at the table, please give your cellphones to Tante Oscar, and she'll put 'em in the fridge for ya.  Bring it to the table, and someone gave that kid over there a remote control F14 fighter with little bitty projectiles and all and it's got this remote control so I'm borrowing it in case--

Oops!  

I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas, and wishing you all a happy New Year!

A Wee Bit of a 3D Mayfair Witches House Update Teaser

The Parlor has been pretty busy with a lot of things, but aren't we all at this time of year?  Not all of it has been good, though, so having something to escape with means my 3D model project of the Mayfair house--1239 First Street in New Orleans--has come a long way.

This is a tiny little teaser, but also to get you thinking about the character of Lasher.  What are his true intentions for the Mayfair Witches?  Why is Christmas so central to Lasher's history and his plans?  And how is that going to play out in Season 2 of AMC's Mayfair Witches when there wasn't any mention of Christmas to any real extent in Season 1?

Michael Curry's love of Christmas really stands out in The Witching Hour.  His memories of Christmas as a child, and his later love of the holiday led to his collecting an assortment of beautiful Christmas ornaments.  When he went back to San Francisco briefly to close up his house and business and ship some of his belongings to New Orleans, among those belongings were some boxes of the Christmas ornaments he'd collected.  He was thrilled to finally be able to have a Christmas tree large enough to display all of these treasures.

This is partly what inspired me to include a version of the Mayfair house that is a Christmas version.  Like the model of the house itself, the Christmas version is by no means finished, but I'm tucking in a few little surprises here and there.

Something else, as long as I'm on the subject of San Francisco: Rowan and Michael relocated just in time in The Witching Hour.  The novel's present-day time is 1989, and San Francisco had the major earthquake in October of that year.  Looking at photos of the area where Michael's house was set in, if he were an actual person, he'd be bleepin' lucky his house managed to escape with what sounds like comparatively minor damage.  Like the roof leak.

At some point, I want to resume exploring Michael's love of Victoriana.  Some things I'm trying to update at the time of year those things are relevant.  In the meantime, I've been looking at other things that could stand to be updated and added on to.  Even things as seemingly insignificant as bits of tradition and cultural heritage unique to New Orleans, seen in creative ways.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, here.  This is a very brief teaser as we get closer to Christmas...

Progress on the Parlor 3D Model of 1239 First Street For Christmas!

Have a look...

The Mayfair Witches Dining Room

As Thanksgiving is near, I thought I would put together an update on the 3D model of the Mayfair house at 1239 First Street focusing on the dining room.  The actual dining room has a panoramic mural that continues along the walls, and in the Lives of the Mayfair Witches, this mural is described as being that of Riverbend Plantation.  This plantation is where the Mayfair Witches settled upon their arrival in Louisiana after having fled Saint-Domingue on the eve of the Haitian Revolution.

Replicating such a mural turned out to be just about impossible, so instead, I found a panorama of a Louisiana bayou.  For some reason, this just made the room "feel" more like the Mayfair Witches' dining room.  In the dining hutch, which is from the 3D model of the Addams house by Demilune, instead of a mirror, I found a rendering of Belle Grove Plantation, which was located in Iberville Parish, Louisiana.  

This is not the dining room of the AMC series, but I did manage to tuck in some of the pomegranate patterned wallpaper in the butlers' pantry, which you get a brief glimpse of.  However, I did put up some framed Mayfair Witches' portraits in this dining room.

The place settings, the dishes and the displays are inspired by Rowan and Michael's exploration of the Mayfair house the day after Deirdre Mayfair's funeral.  I've always loved that tour they took.  Then, there are the candles...

3D Model Goes Inside First Street

 

I am all kinds of excited!  I've finally gotten to a point in the project where I can provide a major update on its progress!  Much more detail has been added to the 3D model of 1239 First Street.

Now, this model is by no means finished.  I have focused a lot on structural details, like the crown mouldings, baseboards, porches, etc.  It's tough to get plain old paint to look right in a house like this, and I cannot imagine how I am going to somehow get the dining room walls to feature the murals (or any murals) the actual house has.  

Not only is the scale of the house quite massive, but the staircase is a lot more narrow and steep than what you would find in houses built in our lifetimes.  The cornices have also been quite a challenge and those are definitely not done yet!

You will see wallpaper in the rooms shown.  You might even recognize some of the wallpaper used.  One Mayfair Witches fan managed to find samples of the wallpaper used for the interior of the Mayfair house in the AMC series.  The dining room is one of those rooms.  If I can't figure out how to get a mural onto the walls in that room, I'll use the wallpaper sample that most closely shows the colors of the mural.  I'll also put the portraits of the Mayfair Witches on the dining room walls as well.  Some are already there.

They might not have the same frames in the finished version that they do now, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

One other thing from the AMC series is one of the photographs Rowan finds in Ciprien's cellphone.  On closer inspection, it is clearly of one of Stella's Roaring Twenties parties.  Photos like this were also mentioned in The Witching Hour, so I've included it here as well. 

In this update, I focused a lot on displaying smaller 3D models inspired by the novels and/or items from the novels.  You will also see one of the maps from The Witches' Companion by Katherine Ramsland displayed in the model.  

I love a good Easter egg, and this 3D model will be no different.  Very, very briefly (for now) are glimpses of a portrait of a woman in the double parlor.  This portrait is from the real life history of 1239 First Street, a portrait of Pamela Starr Clapp.  Her husband, Emory Clapp, bought the house for her as a wedding gift from Elizabeth Brevard, the daughter of the original owner, Albert Hamilton Brevard.  If I recall, Pamela Starr Clapp, who lived in the house from 1869 to her death in 1934, loved her home.  And...she is rumored to haunt the house, probably to this day.

So, I wanted to include a portrait of her in the model as well.  

Are there pictures of Anne Rice in the model?

Does a bear sh--yes, there is one, so far.  The one on the wall is one of my favorites of her.  I do want to include more, though.  Because all of this came from her, and I want the model to ultimately showcase and celebrate what she created.

In The Witching Hour, Rowan Mayfair set about having a "state of the art" phone system installed due to the house being so big.  Phones are phones, but should I reach a point where I do add the kitchen, there is one contribution that must be made.  

The phone in the kitchen will be found in the refrigerator. 

To view the short video, you may go to Come Into My Parlor In 3D or you may view it on the Parlor's YouTube channel...

The Parlor Has Some Goodies and an IWtV Season 2 Update...

The Parlor has been hard at work with building the 3D model of 1239 First Street!  Not only is it to help bring the world of the Mayfair Witches "to life", so to speak, the hobby itself can be calming when world events are in a state of total horror and chaos.  Very soon, I intend to make some brief videos of the model to show the details, but I'll give a few brief teasers here...

The painting is the one used on the first edition cover of Blood Canticle

The first edition of The Witching Hour had a drawing of 1239 First Street on the title page

A model of the coffee cup from Knives Out (2019).  I should make a New Orleans themed version...

For Interview With the Vampire fans, here is a video clip from AMC+'s YouTube channel:

One More Double Parlor Detail...

...the baseboards.