STARDATE1203.25 - NU-CLASSIC SERIES

(Originally posted in my Marbles Drop Channel on IG 11/24-12/24)

In the winter of last year (2023) I was running out of murrine. Scratch that, 3 years ago I started to lightly panic about running out of murrine. But with murrine, there is usually a lot of extra components made initially, and so many little scraps that are thrown to the side in the beginning, that I was able to scrape by for nearly two(!) more years using all the stuff I had already made. Resourceful, yes, but just delaying the inevitable…and I’ll admit, also kind of lazy. So by winter of last year, I was REALLY outta images. So O’Neill Glass (Colton) was in town, and he’s a big murrine guy, so we got to chatting and I’m telling him how I’m dragging my feet about starting a new run of murrine, mostly bc I really hate the coldworking part of the process and how I was considering switching up styles to cut and flips over space, something I’ve been dabbling with behind the scenes for a few years now (It’s coming at some point!).

<Micros Workshop enters the chat> So Micro (Paul) was in town the previous year and I was telling him my woes about starting another run of murrine, yada yada, and he’s telling me he has machines that can process small batches instead of hand polishing each slice individually, or gasp, two at a time! So as I’m chatting with O’Neil, we’re talking about how honeycomb pattern compresses as it’s pulled down, and I’m getting excited about starting some new murrine, and so I pop out a honeycomb, and then another. By the time he leaves, I have 3 or 4 new honeycombs. I call Paul. ”Can you fire up those machines for me?” He says “of course!”

Great, so what does space need the most? Stars! So I get to work on the stars. I have in the past usually only had one star design at a time, so, ambitiously, I draw out 4 new stars. Go big or go hide in another galaxy, am-I-right? By the time the stars get done, I’m back in the game, my brain starts turning, what else do I need? My UFO’s are gone, BAM!, make a couple of UFO’s. (Or should I be calling them UAP’s now? Nah, I’m sticking with UFO’s for now). What’s next? I need rockets! I drew up the SpaceX Starship over a year ago, but was just avoiding making it, so I get to work on the Starship.

FIRST STAR ASSEMBLY:

It's coming together...


All four stars...


Pulled down to send out to Paul...


This is how I get them back from Paul!


Spring ’24, Micro is back in town, we’re working on an underwater scene that transitions into space, so I can put his Mario underwater, and my stars above. But the trials don’t really go as planned and I’m left with some really pretty Meta-terrania/Stardust prep. So I kinda bench that and my brain gets to work in the background while we finish our collabs. There’s something there with the blue prep tho, I can tell. I throw a few rockets over some one day randomly and I think, whoa, some clouds and some sun would be really cool, it’s almost like a daytime launch scene. And BOOM, the Planetary sub-series is born. You can only imagine where that led…should I do all the planets?

The Earth Launch Planetary Marbles...

While focusing on the main series, I was simultaneously designing the planetary sub-series in the background, bc to do something extraordinary, you need to planet out. Ha! At first it was just going to be an Earth launch scene, and since I had the Starship, and a bunch of extra components, I decided it wouldn’t be that much more work to make a booster for it. And that made a ton of sense for the Earth launch scene bc the Starship needs a booster to break thru Earth’s atmosphere to get into space! So I made the booster; both a standalone version (so I could have it separated and returning to Earth autonomously as in IRL), but another version with the booster intact. That last one is one really long skinny murrine!

The Starship in all it's glory...


Early designs of Starship, it's still evolving too btw!


This is the main body of the rocket and the booster, bridged together and ready for more clear and a final pull down...


Started with the SpaceX logo and went on from there...

My progression of thought was, ‘cool, I have this non-space planet, and the primary mission for the Starship is to make it to Mars, so maybe I should do a Mars Landing!’ So I went to work designing an all-red theme for Mars, and settled on a Rust core with a Return to Oz (Red Sparkle) surface banding. The goal was to use the same spiraling motif of surface work as the main NU-Classic series to have some consistency/cohesiveness to the whole series. At the time I was thinking to save everything up for a show, but I kept having more and more ideas, and the idea of settling on a decline didn’t sit right, I wanted to let this go until it felt finished.

"Mars Landing" Each one has the Starship on one side, and usually a UFO lurking on the other side. Starlink satellites hover around to make communication possible, there is an Electrum dot on either side, representing Mars' moons Phobos and Deimos.

Mental health sidebar: I had also been offline most of the time while making this series. In a lot of ways, this series kinda saved me, not to get *too* dramatic, but it’s hard to stay relevant these days with so much going on all the time, the algo’s, the economy. The last few years have been a little funky for me, for a lot of people…but I haven’t had a project of this scope in some time, and that had me feeling some kind of way. Lacking purpose, just waking up and just blowing random glass wasn’t enough, the fact that there was so much negativity online around glass ‘dying’…that made it difficult to really to want to create. So I logged off, for 6 months, and it was the best thing I could have done for my mental health, and my career. I used a musicians analogy when describing it to friends. Instead of dropping an EP each week and trying to stay relevant, I’m going to disappear and make an album…and then go on tour. And that’s exactly what I’m presenting here. I think having the clear mind to dedicate to this project without the distractions and daily side quests from DM’s and content creation, I felt tapped in to some divine spout of creativity. Highly recommended to any artists suffering heavy burnout.

The planetary sub-series are a bit smaller in size, most are between 25-30mm, and I'm loosely trying to keep proportions thru the series. Not to scale bc that would extreme, altho Pluto will be the size of a terp pearl

"Jupiter Fly-by" has Starships, Dragon Capsules, UFO's, and Starlink satellites, as well as 4 sparkle dots representing the four Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Caramel swirls over an Electrum core.

There will be 10(?) sets of 9 planetary marbles (including Pluto) and also the Sun. The first few sets of planetary marbles will be reserved and offered to collectors who own at least one NU-Classic marble from the regular series,  and I'll release the remaining sets as singles in late December or early January after the holidays wind down. That's currently the plan, but things could always change depending on life, scheduling, and feedback received.

And since we're talking numbers here, I should add the main series will be capped at 50. 1-10 are classic Galaxy backs (sparkle black core), 11-20 are Satin-backs (either purple or blue sparkle core), and 21-30 are the new UV murrine (a UV glowing star, 2 UV glowing OFO's, a Starlink satellite with UV glowing radio waves, A UV Dragon capsule, and three hidden UV features that you can't see at all until under the blacklight), over various satin-backs. 30-50 are other variations usually just smaller runs of different backings

And finally, collaborations. I have about 10 collabs rn (AKM, AK, JFK, Micro, Eusheen to name a few) and I’ll be dropping some/all them direct to the site (and maybe? a multi-day auction), thru the holidays. We’ll resume the normal series with No13 on Jan 1st or 2nd…prob depending on the size of my NYE hangover. Collabs and AP’s (Artist Proof’s) will get backup dibs on planetary sets after main series holders make claim, and before singles are released

So after the plenary sub-series spin-off starts, and after the Starship and the booster, I had a bunch of the SpaceX logo left, and my first V1 satellite from IG2.0 had compatibility issues so I didn’t get to use it very much…so a Starlink Satellite seemed like a good way to use the extra logo, and build a (safer) V2 satellite (my first satellites from many years back were sketchy/cracky and used very rarely). Even after the Starlink I still had SO much SpaceX logo, so after watching the Polaris Dawn mission live and then seeing the mission patch, I loved the idea of the Dragon Capsule and the Spacewalker image on my marbles. So I went to work on designing that next. The plan was to build the Capsule, and then build the spacewalker, and then put them together into one pull. But along the way I decided to make a few variations. For one, I like the idea of having everything in one pull, it keeps the proportions nice and consistent, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of also having a separate version, so I could place them further apart if I wanted. So I have them together, apart, and then I took one of the dragon capsule components and ground the top lid off, because it’s presented open in the combined version so the Spacewalker could get outside of the capsule (it has to make sense!) But I also wanted a closed version, so I coldworked the lid off, and striped on a small nose cone so that I could also have a Darong capsule zooming around the universe (can’t zoom around with your nose open!). AND THEN! I still had enough to make a UV outlined close-nose version that fits into the UV lineup.

Polaris Dawn Mission murrine pull w/spacewalker...


Polaris Dawn mission patch graphic that I used for the murrine design...


Planning makes perfect...


SpaceX Starlink Satellites...


Somewhere in the beginning of the series, I wanted to make some new UFO’s. I’ve always done a top-down view of UFO’s, for whatever reason, so I had this underside view UFO drawn up in my notepad that I wanted to do at some pioint. Right after Electrum dropped and I was experimenting with it quite heavily, I decided it might be a sweet color to use for a UFO, bc it was so outer-worldly. Well, I pulled the first part of the UFO and the Electrum pretty much stayed black. Bummed, I set it aside for a few days to think about it. Well, it’s a decent amount of work to get this far, so I kinda wanted to just see it thru, and I’m glad I did bc the electrum ended up being a really cool look. I was able to get two main UFO body components out of the initial pull, so I made one white UFO, and one Black UFO. At the last minute I decided to add a UV outline to them, bc, UV makes EVERYTHING better! (Duh!) So that began the UV introduction to the series. I had enough star parts left over that I made a UV outline 4-pointed star. And then two new UV outlined UFO’s, a UV outlined Dragon Capsule (see above), and then I had enough leftover Starlink satellite…that while I couldn’t outline the actual satellite, I COULD make some cool UV radio waves coming off of them, so I knocked that out. And with the ‘rings’ I needed to make for the Starlinks, I used to make up three completely hidden UV features: circular galaxy rings, oval galaxy rings, and a hidden electromagnetic field.

UV UFO's, on the heating plate and ready for use!


Some of the UV in action...


Another gratuitous UV shot...


Whew! So I think that covers the evolution of the murrine, which is kinda the backbone of the NU-CLASSIC story; it's my drummer on this album, ha! There might be a little more backstory to the satin-backs, but it’s nothing too exciting or dramatic, just playing around with colors until I found something that had a WOW! factor. I have some of those A/B tests set aside for future giveaways.

ADDITIONAL SERIES NOTES from channel member questions: 
The main NU-CLASSIC series will be capped at 50; 1-10 Galaxy-Backs, 11-20 Satin-Backs, 21-30 UV, and 31-50 fun variations. Collabs are un-numbered. Planetary sub-series are 9 planets (inc. Pluto) plus the Sun, to be released in late '25 or early '26.

Thanks for making it this far, Y'ALL DA REAL MVPS!! 
-N8-