Summer Is Almost Over...

...so, here is a newer version of the Destin, Florida beach house rendered from the sketch in The Witches' Companion by Katherine Ramsland...

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

San Francisco and Victoriana

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

Aunt Queen's Cameos: Hidden Gems in Blackwood Farm

When I first read Blackwood Farm, there were many things (other than the timeline) that really caught my attention.  It was no surprise that Rowan Mayfair and Michael Curry were familiar with films like 'Immortal Beloved' and 'Gladiator'.  The book blended aspects of popular culture and the working class (at the time) in with mysterious tales of not-so-imaginary friends and mistresses from Hell, which I enjoyed.  There was another detail in the book that really intrigued me, though.

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.

Stella Mayfair In 3D

I've been doing a little revising and improving upon the next Mayfair Witch in 3D, Stella Mayfair.   I'm still learning how to make 3D people in the way that I want them made, and that particular pose, I thought, was perfect for a ghost one sees in a mirror.

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...

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...

Mayfairs In 3D

Some of the 3D creations by the Parlor are now available for download on 3D Warehouse!  There will be more to come, but so far, I've added my model of the Mayfair Emerald, the jewelry made with the cameos from the cover of the 1st edition of Blackwood Farm, and a little book mentioned in Lasher: Legends of the Highlands.  It doesn't open, but I went for a nice, old leatherbound book feel.

I've also added a few paintings in frames, two of which are of the paintings by Albrecht Durer and Rembrandt.  The portrait used for the 1st edition cover of Blood Canticle is also in a frame for a 3D art gallery.

If you saw my Tomb of the Mayfair Witches video, you might have seen a little something special in it.  That one will make its way to 3D Warehouse as well once I put together a summary of its creation.

I am very busy working on individual rooms in the 3D model of 1239 First Street.  At the moment, I'm working on the dining room, a very interesting room indeed.  Then I had a thought: since the holidays are upon us, what if I set up each room to be seen at completion on particular holidays?  Perfect timing; it's almost Thanksgiving here in America and I'm already working on the dining room! 

All of this is a work in progress, so please do keep checking back for more graphics and more about their significance in the Lives of the Mayfair Witches... 

Happy Halloween! A Parlor Special...

Happy Halloween!

This is perhaps the only time of year I feel is appropriate for unveiling this particular 3D model of mine.  It is the Mayfair tomb, which is set to be located in Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, New Orleans.

Here is each Mayfair Witch at her crypt, which for a number of them would only be cenotaphs.  Respects can still be paid though.

Let's have a look at the mystery of the doorway and the thirteen...

You can also see this video on the Come Into My Parlor In 3D page of the Parlor