Lacrimosa is a rain lamp built around a cast lily of the valley, a piece meant to be looked at, and only looked at. It takes its name from the Latin for "weeping."

The flower is the heart of it. My patron saint is Joan of Arc, whose coat of arms carries the fleur-de-lis. Rather than the usual white lily or iris, I chose the lily of the valley for its silhouette: willowy, downturned, carrying its own sorrow and innocence. In myth it sprang from Mary's tears at the cross, scattering across the valley where they fell. And while religion is complicated, the beauty of the story wasn't, and such beauty stayed with me. That made it the only flower that belonged at the center.

The paint that wouldn't cure was the technical villain, but the real challenge was me. I marry an artistic vision the moment it's conceived and I live and die by it. Multiple CAs told me the cast stem was enough on its own and that I should drop the flowers. I refused.

Sometimes that stubbornness produces work I'm genuinely proud of. More often it manufactures avoidable stress. What Lacrimosa taught me is that process has its own agency, that letting the work push back isn't abandoning the vision, it's refining it through resistance. I spent much of this project resisting the resistance instead of using it to clarify and shape what I was making. Learning when to hold firm and when to let the work happen was hard-earned, and it's the lesson I'm carrying forward.

I came in with far more vision than plan. My first approval meeting made that obvious. The idea was vivid but hard to methodize, and my earliest job was learning to prototype at the right fidelity and communicate, as plainly as I could, how this thing could actually be built without losing the parts that made it matter.

The enclosure was welded, roughly 12 feet of it. Circular, inner-corner, water-tight seams meant an elaborate setup of clamps and heatsinks and slow, deliberate passes, since any blow-through or missed spot became a leak later. It wasn't a skill I could study my way into ahead of time. I just had to do it, and do a lot of it.

The lily stem was cast. I love casting for exactly the reason it terrified me here: you don't know how the part came out until after it's poured. Post-processing was anything but trivial, and it taught me how much earlier planning I owed a process I couldn't fully control.

Finishing was supposed to be the reward. I chose a mirror-finish spray paint for the shine, prepped obsessively (acetone, isopropyl, self-etching primer, 48 hours under a heat lamp), and it still refused to cure. So I stopped hiding the flaws and started framing them: laser-cut aluminum ivy leaves (a simple DXF on the Fablight, high impact for low effort), hand-braided galvanized steel stems, and lily petals hand-bent from the same aluminum sheet.