When it arrived, I was completely blown away... the pictures that Josh had sent to me previously didn't even come close to demonstrating what this work looked like in person. I informed him right away that I wanted to add this work to my collection.

This megaplanet is just over 10 inches in diameter, and weighs something like 60 pounds... it is almost the largest work that Josh can create, and he only creates a few each year. (These megaplanets are so massive that they require forty days in an annealing oven to cool down to room temperature!)

There is an almost infinite amount of detail in this work... some of the visible features include anemone fields, forests, and orbiting spaceships, all created using murrine (canework), deserts of gold leaf, differently-colored seas (blue seas in the southern hemisphere, and deep black seas in the north), coils of platinum wire floating above the surface of the planet, and a cool small "implosion" effect near the equator. There is also a very cool "slash" of gold and iridescent color that crosses the dark sea. As with Josh's other planets, this megaplanet contains a world on the inside, visible through the base of the work. You could literally spend a week taking in all of the detail, there's so much of it. The base of the work is flat and has LRF support.

How this work was named: When I was talking with Josh, I told him that I thought that works of this scale deserved better names than "Megaplanet" or "M3". Josh asked me if I had any suggestions, so I sent him three suggestions based on Greek and Roman mythology. For this world, I suggested the name Persephone (per-SEFF-uh-nee). In mythology, Persephone was the daughter of Zeus, the Greek king of the gods, and Demeter, the Greek goddess of agriculture. Persephone was incredibly beautiful, but was kidnapped by Hades to rule with him as queen of the underworld. Because this planet is so beautiful, and yet contains so much darkness (the dark sea), I thought that Persephone would be a good name for this work. Josh added the word "Dark" to the name to make it Dark Persephone, which I think is an excellent name for this work.

This work is without a doubt one of the coolest in my collection.

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