So it’s honestly been a really long time since I have been on here, i had a lot going on and i had to fix things in my life. But now i’m ready to come back. Now that I am, I have an announcement/shout out to make.

My older brother has started a Youtube page, he hopes to spread laughter and the likes to as many people as he can. If you could please take a look at his page, it would mean the world to me! The link is down below along with the link to his tumblr page (which i help manage) where he will post updates, links to videos, and times when he will be broadcasting. If you have any questions for him, or me, dont be afraid to ask! Have an amazing day everyone!!!

His Tumblr:

https://whodatjwhitt.tumblr.com/

His Youtube: 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1RN72ct-vLZguFiaxNNPNg?view_as=subscriber

WARNING, DEPRESSION POST AHEAD. YOU’VE BEEN WARNED

I’m pretty sure no one is going to respond to this. I guess i’m just posting this for myself more than anything. So If you don’t want to hear my problems, just move on.
Slightly tipsy, I sit in the tub on my laptop. Yes. In the tub. On my laptop. (My set-up is quite nice, in my eyes at least) Honestly, it’s the place i’m most honest with myself about everything.
I’m.Not.Ok. I haven’t been, for a while. I accept that, I always accepted that. But what I just recently have been fighting myself to accept, is, that i’m probably not going to get the help I need. For a while, I’ve been promised help, therapy, medicine, anything I want… But where is it, now that I look around? It’s not just my parents, it’s others as well. I don’t have a job, I quit it. I don’t have money, I spent it all. But what do I have? An aching feeling in my chest of loneliness and despair.. a room full of trivial items that, at the moment, I did want, but now that I look around it’s just that…trivial.. I’ve been forcing myself to cosplay, to feel like I look good, forcing myself to want to do things, when, all I really want to do, is sleep. I barely eat, yet I’ve gained so much weight, I dropped everything I was passionate about..singing, drawing..hell even my cosplay has been going out the window…talk about a waste of money. Things aren’t ok relationship wise either, but, I won’t get into that out of the sake of privacy I guess. Let’s just say I haven’t been wearing my ring for a long time now, and, there’s a blank white tan line stripe on my finger, showing me the emptiness I feel inside. My emotional state has been crashing like a long empty building, no longer needed… I stay up till four or five in the morning, pretending i’m ok, only to break down every time I lay down in the dark. Then I sleep, again, till four or five in the afternoon, wasting my day away because, what do I have to look forward to? A house filled with people that say they care, but, show no acts of actually caring? People who say “you can be happy, you just need to get up!” and do what? Clean, like you keep saying? Why should I clean everyone else’s messes and mistakes, when I don’t clean up my own? I’m twenty-one, without a license, car, or a job. And, I can’t find it in myself to care anymore. I had planned out my suicide a week or so ago, was even saying goodbye to the two people who showed any care towards a broken doll like me. They talked me out of it, but, that didn’t stop me from the self harm. I broke a promise, and, I cried about it. But then asked myself “why make that promise anyway, when you know you don’t care about yourself enough to keep it?” My head is right…heh..it always has been.. Dangled in front of me, is a free ride to college, from my parents. People keep telling me I need to take advantage of it. But there’s nothing I even want to do, everything I think of, I talk myself out of because I’m not good enough, in my own eyes. So here, at the end of this long rant, the alcohol having already worn off, my head clouded with judgement and bad choices, I leave a note.
To my best friend: You’ll be ok. Everything happens for a reason, you are strong, independent, and you don’t need him. I love you, sister, and you know you can always contact me whenever.
To my…I don’t know what I should call you…To..The one person who I thought was my ride or die..: I’m sorry for all the mistakes I made, I’m sorry I never made you feel good enough, happy enough, or loved enough. My issues with myself screwed up everything I could have had with you. I’m tearing up now because well..I think you need to find someone else…Not me. I’m too messed up to be fixed, and, I don’t want you dragged into this mess of my life that I can’t fix right now anymore. We can stay friends, I want at least that, but…a relationship…we shouldn’t have that…I’m not good enough for you..the most cliched saying “it’s not you, it’s me” is true in this statement. It really is me. I’m sorry.

To myself: I know you’re broken, I know that you want help, and, crying out for it didn’t help, they didn’t react how you’d expected them to, they didn’t do what they promised they would do, they just keep buying you things in the hopes that you’ll be ok and work out of this depression. It doesn’t work like that, and, you know that. With anxiety piling on top of the severe depression, you’re struggling to find a job that doesn’t put you on the spot as much as the last two did.  Your brothers being how they are don’t help either, and, your family forcing you to be what you don’t feel right as, is NOT helping… But maybe you’re playing into their hands with that, I suppose, since, you don’t ask to be called “Richard” anymore since they make such a big deal about it, going as far as to call you “dick” even when you ask them not to… 

To everyone else, who read this far: I’m sorry i’m never on here anymore, or if I am, it’s just to post depressing shit.. It’s my cry for help I suppose. But none of you can help me…I can only help myself, and, I can’t do that. I just…don’t care about myself enough anymore. So thank you, for reading this far. Thank you for suffering through my depression shit for as long as you have, if you even did that is. This will most likely be my last post on here, before I just stop posting all together and keep this account for the sake of nostalgia.

Thank you. Have a good day/night. Sincerely, a person to careless to even call themselves by their name.

yaexrae:

I know there are a kajillion of horn tutorials out there already, but I ended up using a method to make my horns that I haven’t seen written about yet.  So just in case you guys are curious, here’s how I made my troll horns.

(Tons of pictures ahead, apologies in advance.)

FIRST!  Please read the entire tutorial before running out and buying supplies - a lot of the stuff I used can be swapped with other things that you may happen to already have lying around your house.  Save your money for other stuff!

For supplies, I used the following things:

Unpictured supplies include large snaps (the kind used in clothing), scraps of Wonderflex (any rigid material will do), hot glue, and a cheap wire cat brush. 

The basic method I used to make my horns was this:  I used the polyurethane expanding foam to carve out a base for my horns, then covered them in foil and Paperclay.  After texturing the clay, I let them air-dry and painted them with acrylic paints.  To attach them to my wig I used the snaps, Wonderflex, and hot glue.

(Also, this tutorial is sort of pieced together from pictures I took while making two sets of horns.  Just in case you’re wondering why Mindfang’s horns suddenly change into Kanaya’s and vice versa.)

Part 1:  Creating the Foam Base

Polyurethane expanding foam is awesome stuff to use when you need a lightweight, carve-able base for sculpting things.  It’s usually sold in the insulation department of home improvement stores like Lowes or Home Depot.  For my horns I used Fill & Seal, which was $3 per can.

First, protect your working area with parchment paper or wax paper.  (In a pinch I suppose you could use newspaper, but the foam will stick to that.  You’ll be carving off a good portion of the foam anyway though.)  Attach the nozzle to the can and dispense some foam onto the parchment paper, creating some roughly horn-sized lumps.  I have no idea how to clean the nozzle once foam has been through it, so I just kept making foam lumps until the can was empty.  For me, it was about 7 or 8 medium-sized foam lumps per can.  Keep the extras in case you screw up, or give them to friends who are also making horns.  Let the lumps cure overnight, or at least for several hours.

Next, peel the foam off of the parchment paper and check to make sure you don’t have any humongous voids.  If you don’t, then you’re good to go!

If you need to take a break, now is a good time.  I unfortunately discovered that if you start carving the foam and leave it alone for a few hours, it will shrink and distort slightly (maybe about a 10-20% size change).  It’s probably a good idea to set aside enough time to sculpt your foam bases and cover them in clay all in one sitting.

To sculpt the horns, I used a box cutter.  The foam is fairly soft and flexible, so the box cutter slides through it really easily!  The more blade of the box cutter you expose, the wider your cutting surface will be and the easier it will be to knock off large sections of foam.  To remind myself of the general shape I wanted, I used a sharpie marker to trace an outline on the foam.

Here are the horns after I made the basic shaping cuts.

Knock off the edges and continue to sculpt them into the proper shape.  Make sure you frequently compare the horns to each other to maintain symmetry.

Knock off part of the base of the horn so that it will be able to sit on your head properly.  I had a mirror nearby and was holding these horns up to my head a LOT during the sculpting process to make sure I had the proper angulation and size.

In the end, you should get something like this!

You’ve probably noticed that the foam can get a lot of big air bubbles in it.  If there are any large air bubbles in your horns at this point, you can tear up smaller scraps of the foam and shove them in the voids.

Part 2:  Covering the Base

Cover the horn in tin foil.  It doesn’t need to be a gigantic piece - I used a square whose diagonal width was slightly wider than the length of my horn.  Make sure the piece of foil doesn’t develop small tears when you’re taking it off the roll, otherwise it’ll be a pain in the ass when you’re burnishing it.

Find something hard to burnish the foil with.  I used the barrel of a highlighter and rubbed it over the foil to adapt it to the surface of the foam.

After I had covered and burnished both horns, I hacked off the end of one and added some copper wire to serve as a skeleton for Mindfang’s weird little claw thing.  Note that for her other horn (which will have a hook on the end), I didn’t do anything.  It’s up to you to choose which parts of your horns you want to use a wire base for, if at all.

Next, get out your clay and begin coating your horns with it.  (I highly suggest Paperclay - it is an air-dry clay that dries light and strong.  Not all air-dry clays are the same!  Stay away from Crayola brand Air Dry Clay, it is extremely dense and crumbly and pretty awful for this project.)  If you don’t have a rolling pin to thin out the clay, the Fill & Seal can makes a great substitute.  Keep a dish of water nearby so you can use it to blend the seams in your clay.

Sculpt whatever weird things you need on the ends of the horns, and be sure to blend the seams in with water.

The horns are now fully coated!  Hooray!  At this point the clay was too malleable for my liking and it kept squishing around in my hands every time I picked up the horns, so I let them dry for an hour or so before starting to add texture to them.  The Paperclay dries pretty slowly, so you can afford to take a short break.

Part 3:  Texturing the Horns

For this part, I was lazy and didn’t want to take a series of pictures, so you get a video of me rambling on about cow horns and shit for seven minutes.  Enjoy!

After you’ve textured the horns, let them air dry overnight.  (I’d like to point out that this is why I suggest a water-based clay instead of a polymer clay like Sculpey that requires baking in an oven.  I have no idea what’ll happen if you stick polyurethane foam in the oven - it might catch fire or release some horrible death gas.  Just use a clay that hardens via air exposure, please. ;_;)

Part 4:  Painting the Horns

(My apologies - this section is kind of light on pictures because of camera issues.)

To paint the horns, I mixed up four colors using acrylic paint:  dark brown, red, orange, and yellow.  The dark brown goes on first as the base coat.  Make sure you get the brown into all of the little nooks and crannies you created, but don’t just glop paint on either.  If you lay on the paint too thickly, you’ll fill in all the little pores you worked so hard to create in the previous step! Let the base coat dry.  When you add the lighter colors later, the brown will only show through in the recessed areas of your horns.

Next:  using a small, short brush, begin painting on the yellow, orange, and red.  (Technically, the trolls’ horns don’t have any red in them, but I like to add a little bit near the base of the horns anyway to give them a bit wider of a color range.)  I used a technique called drybrushing to blend from one color to the next.  Basically, you load only the tip of the brush with paint and dab it on your palette a few times to take off any excess paint.  The paint should be applied to the horns using a brisk tapping motion rather than a series of long strokes.  If your brush is appropriately loaded, the paint should be dry within seconds of its application.

When you’re done, you should have something like this!

Part 5:  Attaching the Horns

The cool thing about these horns is that they’re extremely light, so you don’t have to do a whole lot of work to attach them to your head!  However, the following method requires that you wear a wig - apologies to those of you who want to use your real hair for troll cosplay.

To attach the horns to my wig, I cut out a circular base out of Wonderflex that was about as twice the diameter of my horns.  (Wonderflex is a pretty nifty thermoplastic that you can mold with a blowdryer.  You can buy some here, but it’s really not worth getting just for some troll horns.  I just had a lot of scraps lying around.  Any stiff material will probably work, even cardboard from a cereal box.)  To make it easier for my fingers to get to the snaps, I cut out two C-shaped divets out of either side of each circle and rounded the resulting sharp edges.

Next, glue some large snaps (approximately ¼") to the base of your horns.  With both pieces snapped together, add a dollop of glue to the free side of the snaps and press the base up against the snaps.  This way the snap pieces on the horn and the snap pieces on the base will line up perfectly!  Once the glue has cooled, carefully pry the snaps apart.  If something separates where it shouldn’t, just peel the excess hot glue off and try again.

To attach the horns to your wig, simply sandwich the wefts of the wig between the snaps on your horns, and press the base and the horn together.  Positioning the horns can get a little tricky, but once you’ve got them attached to the wig they’re not really going anywhere unless you want them to.  This is what the inside of your wig should look like when the horns are in place.

And voila!  You get lightweight horns with no bothersome headband, and if you need the wig for something else all you have to do is unsnap the horns.

Happy trolling! >:3

Edit:  A lot of people have asked me if the snap attachment method will work for larger horns, and I don’t know!  Here is the best advice I can give for large horns until I actually have the opportunity to make a pair myself.

Edit 2:  I have made a pair of Tavros horns!  Here is a video I made about how to attach them.  I ended up using a method that didn’t use snaps, but it still results in the horns being removable and no headband showing on the outside of the wig.