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Description
part of art trade with his half

he had requested a sphinx and included an image of a winged one, but left all the details to me. that's always a gamble...

i wasn't hit with immediate inspiration, so went into research. starting with winged form of sphinx, that meant greek myth, which puts her as the daughter of orthrus, a two headed dog killed by Heracles. then jumped to multi-head idea, but wasn't sure how to position it. struggling with that idea, went on wikipedia to get an idea of sphinx in other cultures, but it goes into beast-people, not similar stories with human-headed monsters posing riddles. it did offer an alternate riddle the sphinx (greek) could ask and had an image of a burmese female headed-lion bodied guardian used to decorate the base of pillars. the image shows a person chest head on, then two different posteriors going to either side. presumably, this is a frieze with showing the head at the front of the pillar, then different bodies off either side (left side has the left knee up and right leg down, right side vice-versa), which reminded me of depictions of the lamassu in assyrian gateways, showing 2 legs from the front and 4 from the sides (corner is a leg, so attempt to use friezes makes 5 legged beast). having a 2 headed parent, thought it would be interesting if child had 2 bodies. bermese image also had details along arm reminding me of feathers, so added them for fun detail (concerned i went too peacock with their detail...)

and kept going from there... so the alternate riddle is, "there are two sisters: the first gives birth to the other, who in turn gives birth to the first. who are they?" *Spoilers* night and day. had the thought to keep a stone detail and went looking for stones related to the sun and moon. settled on rainbow feldspar and grusol quartz. both are translucent with cloudy white edges, rainbow feldspar has iridescent iron oxides that grow in hexagonal rods and orient to magnetic fields, so you get these rhomboidal boxes.

Description
part of art trade with his half

he had requested a sphinx and included an image of a winged one, but left all the details to me. that's always a gamble...

i wasn't hit with immediate inspiration, so went into research. starting with winged form of sphinx, that meant greek myth, which puts her as the daughter of orthrus, a two headed dog killed by Heracles. then jumped to multi-head idea, but wasn't sure how to position it. struggling with that idea, went on wikipedia to get an idea of sphinx in other cultures, but it goes into beast-people, not similar stories with human-headed monsters posing riddles. it did offer an alternate riddle the sphinx (greek) could ask and had an image of a burmese female headed-lion bodied guardian used to decorate the base of pillars. the image shows a person chest head on, then two different posteriors going to either side. presumably, this is a frieze with showing the head at the front of the pillar, then different bodies off either side (left side has the left knee up and right leg down, right side vice-versa), which reminded me of depictions of the lamassu in assyrian gateways, showing 2 legs from the front and 4 from the sides (corner is a leg, so attempt to use friezes makes 5 legged beast). having a 2 headed parent, thought it would be interesting if child had 2 bodies. bermese image also had details along arm reminding me of feathers, so added them for fun detail (concerned i went too peacock with their detail...)

and kept going from there... so the alternate riddle is, "there are two sisters: the first gives birth to the other, who in turn gives birth to the first. who are they?" *Spoilers* night and day. had the thought to keep a stone detail and went looking for stones related to the sun and moon. settled on rainbow feldspar and grusol quartz. both are translucent with cloudy white edges, rainbow feldspar has iridescent iron oxides that grow in hexagonal rods and orient to magnetic fields, so you get these rhomboidal boxes.