I’m late for the last installment of the 52 Color Challenge – the holidays were amazingly fun, of the sort of fun which didn’t inspire me to sit on a computer and take pictures – and so I am horribly tardy! Boo me! Amazon is a really fun color, though, and I ended up being inspired by a new release from Wishbox for the final challenge of the final end of the Color Challenge. A few more options have popped up or a replacement, but I’m not sure how many I’ll try to do; I try to minimize my stressors, and leave this blog a fun place, but I also really enjoy inspirations to delve into the depths of my inventory and pull out new, fun, and beautiful things. We’ll see how the balance ends up finding itself in twenty thirteen. At least I’m starting out in a gorgeous, lacy gown by Wishbox» View author and full post…, inspired by the best in Gothic Lolita style – I adore the lacy sleeves. My one complaint, if it can even be called that, is that the sleeves don’t bend with my arms; I’ve been very spoilt by rigged mesh, and it amazes me to realize how briefly it has been used for clothing in Second Life.

Lake pigments are pigments which aren’t naturally thick enough to make into paint, and so they have to be combined with something – a thickener – before being turned into some sort of paint using a medium. It has an ancient history – used across Asia and down into Egypt for a variety of tasks, including clothing dye and coloring ceramics, but it wasn’t until the 1800s that a thickener combination was found which enabled it to be used as paint. In the late 1800s the first artificial red was created, based off of the chemical makeup of madder, and even that faint remnant of madder vanished when light resistant reds were synthesized in the 1950s. I went with a slightly orange red for my tinting, as I found nothing in my inventory to match, and actually swiped ideas shamelessly from other bloggers this week – Luna herself inspired the necklace, though I tinted mine, and vyoletta guyot pointed me toward the awesome dress to match. I ended up looking into Madder Lake Deep‘s history for some idea of what to say; it’s my first day of vacation, and I’m feeling kind of brainless and stressed (a difficult combination!).

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I ended up taking pictures at The Tower, but I’m deeply conflicted about it – and the vast majority of my pictures made use of the environment of the tower without particularly focusing on most of the figures within it.