@Lillhans Thank you, Anders. I just found your tutorial on the Profantasy community page for your faux handwritten style. Much appreciated. I haven't done any tinkering with creating styles on my own before or set up any drawing tools to speak of. I'll need to take it slowly to ingest what you have documented there and do a little experimenting.

Vielen dank.

@Lillhans I like the goblet. It does look like how I imagined the Holy Grail to look. A carpenter's cup and not a king's chalice. But am I right in thinking you're thirteen pages into a tutorial of some kind? One that might reveal to the world the secrets behind your "fake hand-drawing" style. That would be sweet. Any idea when we might expect . . . hope . . . for a completion of that project? And should we look for it here or on another platform?

@Lillhans I really like the look of your hand-drawn style. It has a natural elegance to it. I would love to learn how you do it. I know you've given brief explanations before here in the forum, but when I tried to duplicate what I thought you had said, I just couldn't get it to work.

Would you please make some kind of tutorial, written down here or perhaps put it in a you-tube video, where you explain each step in detail. For example, are you using a mouse or a tablet to draw the lines? What specific tools are you working with? I think you mentioned a closed polygon with a degree of fractalization, but I couldn't figure out how to make that into a line in CC3+ without looking like a mess.

Any help you would care to offer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Elfling

@Wyvern You seem to have a habit these days of hijacking threads, but so be it. You are absolutely correct in looking back to Julius Caesar for the origins of our calendar mess. Hence, as you say, the "Julian" calendar. He wanted to be immortalized so he placed his own month smack-dab in the middle of the year, pushing the other months down. Some time later, Caesar Augustus, not wanting to be outdone, added his own month ("August") just after Julius ("July"), once again sliding the months down. Hence we have September (the 7th month) now as the ninth; October (the 8th) became the tenth; November (the 9th month) became the eleventh and December (the 10th month) was destined to be celebrated as the twelfth month. The last two original month names fell off and have been forgotten.

As to the western traditions involving our common religious holidays, they were in use long before the middle ages. These all date back to the pagan mystery religions of Babylon some twenty-five hundred to thirty-five hundred years ago. The combination of eggs and bunnies were symbols of fertility for the so-called Queen of Heaven, Semiramis. The name Easter itself is derived from the Babylonian goddess "Ishtar," and was a form of Semiramis/Astarte/Isis worship. We can thank the Roman emperor Constantine (circa 320 AD, or CE if you prefer) for beginning the process of incorporating the practices of earth-based pagan religions with a form of quasi-Christianity to make the new state religion of Christianity more appealing to the masses of his empire. The practices didn't change really, just the names. Unfortunately most of this pagan symbolism persists today.

@Loopysue

A giant ocean of gas. Wow! I like that. I normally think of it as a large blister or pocket of air, which obviously exists in a gaseous form. A clear vapor you might say . . . normally. Our atmosphere, contained in an envelope, like a huge balloon which encompasses our tiny planet. Let's just hope some giant kid doesn't wander by and pop it.