You may or may not know this, but my mother made tombstones for a living. Aside from being great goth street cred in my teens, I credit the years I spent watching her work and accompanying her to cemeteries with influencing not only my love of typography but my interest in grave art. For a brief time, I also worked in the industry although by that time much of the design was digital and the intricate work done by machines, which erased a lot of the opportunity for true artisan work my mother spent her life doing by hand.
My mother always said that one day she would open her own monument shop and name it Meatyard's Graveyard, but she never got the chance. So, this is - in a small but loving way - me making good on her dreams.
Each one of these miniature tomb stones are hand-built (no 3-D printing) out of a core of styrofoam, lightweight spackle, and heavyweight watercolor paper. The design is rendered in watercolor, gouache, and colored pencil, assembled with glue and a wood armature, and finished with a felt covering on the base. To keep them from being too light, they each contain a 1oz weight embedded in the base to give them stability.
The size varies slightly from one stone to the next, but the base and stone thickness are a consistent one inch. The tallest example here, #3: Co-Dependent Tendencies, measures just over 7" tall, and the shortest, #1: Our Hope For The Future, is about 5.5". If you have any questions or need more accurate measurements, please feel free to contact me via email and I am happy to answer your query.
The designs themselves are based on historical tomb stone carvings from the 17th-19th centuries and have symbolic meanings. If you are interested in learning more about this, I urge you to visit your local historic cemeteries and see what designs people in times past used to memorialize their dead. It's a fascinating and beautiful history.