Fair warning: This is not meant to be a meditation aid. In fact, it's quite the opposite. The geometry is deliberately skewed and off-kilter, and the yantra is not a true yantra - it has broken bits, weird angles, has been mirrored and rotated, and is made of bones. If you stare long into this colorful abyss and summon something you shouldn't have, don't come cryin' to me! I might give you a marshmallow to feed it, though.

A couple of years ago, I made a Yantra of Dubious Provenance for a friend's promotional material for his book. I had a couple of alternate ideas for the structural details of the design that we decided not to use, and I thought I would explore one of those ideas with this second design.

The idea was to use a whole lot of bones. So a great deal of the structural geometry is comprised of fantasy bones of all sorts, claws, teeth, vertebrae...

It was deliriously tedious fun to draw it all out, and then color it. [Checks calendar] It took me seven months to color this thing! Granted, I worked mostly on the weekends up until the very end, where I just wanted to get the thing done.

I also needed something to fill in the space around the circle-and-star design, so I decided to go with wings. Lots of wings. There's definitely something of the ophanim about it ("Wheels of the Chariot of God" or something along those lines). One of the first prints I make will take this idea a step further, and will involve the use of about 400 googly eyes. I didn't want to do the googly eye treatment to the original... Though I was tempted by the end of the project.

I used a very faint template for the geometric forms that I composed in Photoshop. I drew and inked my bone design over the simple geometric forms, then added all the details like the eye-wing ovals, the little bones within the star shapes, and the wings. That process took about four weekends, I think.

I colored this with Prismacolor pencils. There's no watercolor underlayer this time; I didn't want anything to tint the colors since I planned to use the full spectrum of colors throughout the image. Pure rainbowlicious terror and weirdness.

I also used a small selection of stones:

On the outermost bone circle, there are black color-treated agates.

At the outer points of the star are lapis lazuli.

Where the star lines overlap are manufactured turquoise/copper composites.

In the center is an Ethiopian opal that shimmers green and gold.