The making of Astras Birthday Sketch

I finally bit the bullet and bought a new camera. It's a canon powershot sx20. It's a point and shoot with manual functions and HD video capability. I love it. I definitely have a lot to learn as my manual pictures are pretty lacking but I'm having a good time learning! Lucky for me I have a lot of really talented, very patient friends who are willing to share their knowledge of photogaphy with me. Anyway, the first thing I have done with the video feature is to make a time lapse video of a drawing that I made for my friend Astras belated birthday. I hope that you enjoy it!


Astras Birthday Sketch


Also, I have a ghetto flickr account now. Check It out!


That's pretty much all for me. Hope everyone is doing well!

Data Moleskine and Milano

Here is the third moleskine journal that I completed. I'm on a real STNG kick with my gentleman lately so it's no surprise that this next journal would feature one of my favourite characters.

Once again it doesn't really look too much like data but you get the general impression :)

I should also mention that I bought an accordion recently and have been taking lessons! I'm only on my second lesson so I feel bad for my neighbours who have to endure my constant practising but hopefully they will here some improvement! I love my little instrument but i don't think it will be too long before i have to do an upgrade.

Bad Celebrity Impersonators

So I have been working this week on a small project. After being inspired by some beautiful paintings by one of my favourite artists on Deviant Art, Lily-Fox. Hers of course are a million times more wonderful than anything i have been able to do yet but it was fun to try.




This journal is supposed to be of bettie page, whom I love. I'm making it for a sister of mine who actually looks a lot like bettie page herself! Lucky! Anyway as you can see it doesn't really look like either of them XD unfortunately. I think if I had just been trying to do a picture of a girl from the 50's then i could be pretty happy with it but i kind of missed the mark on this one. Still, it's better than the plain old cover right?

I'm probably going to finish this with a light varnish but i want to try it out on something else first so that it doesn't get ruined.

The next one is supposed to be mr. Presley himself and once again I find that it looks more like a bad celebrity impersonator than the King himself. Actually at first it was looking like my Elvis was starting to look like *shudders* someone out of a twilight movie. I restrained myself from burning it and decided to just try my best to fill the rest with enough references that people would know who he was. I gotta say I love that red acrylic ink. It's magic. I love that true red colour. It's just so applealing to my eyes.

I have one left to finish and i'll post it when i'm finished.



**The small journals that I have used are by Moleskine and have cardboard covers. The come in packs of 3 which is perfect for what I have in mind. They are 3.5 X 5.5. I used a mix of pigma waterproof markers for the black outline. The white area is Acryla Gouache and it's the one of the first times I have used it. It's not as opaque as I would have liked and I had to use a lot of it to get good coverage but i love how mat and chalky it looks. I used FW acrylic inks for the black, red and blue bits. I'm not usually an acrylics person but I LOVE the inks. I love how they flow and the coverage is awesome. One thing that I wish I had known before using them on the cardboard cover is that they tend to bleed out a bit. I prefer a crisp edge. It's hard to see but there is gold acrylic in this as well on the stars, crown and accents. It's a crappy old craft acrylic heavy body paint that's been kicking around my art drawer forever and still manages to come out every now and then. I might consider doing gold leaf in the future. Ooh and some of the shading-there isn't much as it didn't work too well-was done with water soluble graphite.**

Self Portrait

The art store I work for asks it's staff to do a self portrait for the store after they have been working their for a year. I got asked to do mine about a week or two ago? I've gotta say I have been planning my portrait for awhile now and was very eager to carry it out.

Next to the wall of portraits at the art store there is a wall of miscellaneous art that most likely comes from the different companies that sell to us. One of these pieces of art has fascinated me since my first day working there. It's a simple sketch of Elvis Presley but the weird thing is that he kind of looks like Mr. Darcy of Jane Austen fame.

The day I worked on it was really sunny so it was the perfect opportunity to use my window as a giant tracing surface. After taping the image up on my sliding doors I went about taking pictures of myself to use for my self portrait. This was the only part of the process that i didn't enjoy. Eventually though i weeded something decent out of the group of shots and proceeded to trace the main part of the face and hair on a new layer in photoshop.

I also rotated the original image so that it would line up with the original elvis portrait. I was originally going to try to do this without tracing (because I kind of have the looming feeling that I cheated) but I really wanted to get all of the proportions right. And in the end I feel like it turned out really nicely this way. Anywho, the magical thing about drawing your own portrait is that things like double chins and blemishes can just magically disappear whenever you want them to! If only you could do this in real life. 

Next few photos are just to give you an idea of how easy this project was.

I did this portrait on stonehenge warm white. It's a great paper for sketching on. It's a bit hard to go back to anything else really. It even takes wet effects quite well too. For this portrait my original plan was to try to replicate the sketchy rough style of the original but that quickly turned to bunk because i like smooth lines so much and the sketch just didn't look quite right. I kept a reference of both faces for shading and things like that. In the left hand picture you can kind of see that i have placed the outline of my face on top of the photocopy of the suit and tie and am tracing over that to bring the two together. I should also add that the majority of this was drawn in a pencil that I had never used before but that i am now in love with. It's the Generals Sketch and Wash pencil which is as I'm sure you can imagine water soluble and awesome :D It made the shading quite painless. For elvis's suit i used a large water soluble graphite crayon that I can't remember the name of -_- Anyways all in all a good experience and I am really happy with how it all turned out in the end.

Now I'm off to see if the mats and frame for it are in! Hopefully so :) I will post a photo of the complete package when it is all put together.

Valentines Day Roast Beast Recipe

So there I was feeling delightfully greased up on a fat girls meal of Macdonalds and probably making the folks at People of Walmart proud in an ill fitting pair of jogging pants when low and behold an Angel of the LordWalmart shined down on me in the form of an amazing deal! There before me on a gleaming metallic shelf was a wall of slow cookers for only $15! Even though I have never actually cooked anything in a slow cooker before or actually looked at a slow cooker with the intention to buy one and thus had no authority as to whether or not $15 was actually an amazing deal something about it caught my attention. I was mesmerized. If I had this device I could now cook things...slowly!?!

I bought the slow cooker and went about day dreaming about what delicious things I would make with it but I really didn't have a very good idea of what I could really do. A quick search around google made my decision for me. I would make roast beef for my man child for Valentines day. I might not be the Man child specialist that I sometimes like to think that I am but there is one thing that I know for sure. My man child loves manly meals. Give him meat and potatoes and he's satisfied. After a quick search on allrecipes.com and I found a delicious sounding recipe which sounded easy to make. Roast Beast is so wonderful that I have kind of been nervous up until now to make it because I imagined it would be complicated. I couldn't have been more wrong. And the great thing about having the slow cooker is that it was all ready for me when I got home after work!




Awesome Slow Cooker Pot Roast



The pot roast that I bought was about 2 pounds pounds which was enough in the end to be two meals, one night with an extra person so it fed 5 people with some left over. I've changed the recipe in some barely noticeable ways so feel free to check out the recipe that I started with on the link in the start of this blog entry.

1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup
3/8 package dry onion soup
1/2 cup water **someone recommended using a 1/2 cup of beef broth instead which sounds awesome but i was senile and it somehow didn't make it home with me**
2 pounds roast beef
3 carrots, chopped up and peeled
6 small yellow potatoes **i basically just did enough to fill up the extra room in the crock pot**
1/2 onion sliced. Save a few pieces to put on top of the roast
i clove garlic, minced
pinch of pepper

So i started this at about 7 in the morning since most slow cooker recipes for this particular meal say that if you are going to cook on the low setting that it should cook for about 8 to 9 hours.

Prepare your veggies and put them into the crock pot. You will want a small layer of veggies for the pot roast to sit on because it gives it extra flavour. Once that is done put the roast on the small layer of veggies and surround it with the remaining ones. Put a slice or two of onions on top of the roast and if you like a pinch of pepper as well.

In a separate bowl mix the mushroom soup, dry onion soup and water together until they are decently blended. Pour this mixture on top of the roast beef and veggie combo and you are ready to put the slow cooker on it's lowest setting and go about your day!



Results

The Roast Beast was cooked to perfection! It was so delicious and moist, it fell apart when you cut into it. SO juicy and good. The veggies were great as well and after thickening up the left over sauce with some cornstarch and flour it made an awesome gravy. Cook up some yorkshire puddings to go along with it and you are set! I would totally make this again and would like to see if substituting the 1/2 cup broth for the 1/2 cup water would make much a difference as this roast was pretty darned flavourful as is.

My manchild even gave it an unprecedented 6 out of 5 autobots! Wicked.

Much ado about stamping

So i decided to take on the task of making personalized stamps for all of my 15 coworkers this christmas. It was definitely a bit more than I bargained for and I'm not actually sure of what they will actually be used for HOWEVER I did eventually get them done for the most part (except for suzi's which I will finish tonight) and in time for christmas and everything! Go me! People seemed pretty happy with them although my coworkers are all amazing and would seem thankful for whatever you gave them, with the exception of perhaps a kick to the head or a disease. They're odd like that.

Anyway I tell you all this because I hadn't posted to the blog for awhile and thought this the perfect opportunity to update.

In a perfect world in which I wasn't a procrastinator and had actually looked around to get the proper size stamper block (I wanted it to be bigger then the actual stamp itself) before it was down to the last minute then my project might have gone a bit smoother. Because this isn't a perfect world I had to pretty much do with what i could scrape together at micheals and hope for the best!

The hardest part of this project was thinking of what to do for each coworker. After that i carved each indiviual design onto the individual lino stamps which i then glued red felt to. In the meantime I covered small wooden blocks with identical red felt and attached them to the stamps. Bada-boom Bada-bing finito. It actually took me a really long time. Don't let the crappy quality of the stamps deceive you ;)

Here in no particular order is a few of the stamps that I ended up with.

So that is a small example for you! I love block printing. I really need to do more of it, just need to find the time. In other news (which is really news as old as time itself) shock of all shocks this years new years resolution is again to lose weight -_-. However this time i actually joined a gym! Watch out pants. You have slumbered in my dresser for too long! Hopefully one of these posts i will have news about excellent weight loss success! I guess we'll just have to see :D

Corn and Crab Chowder

Since it's November and it's getting chilly out I'm starting to think about soups and stews! I tried an especially delicious recipe last night from the cook book "The complete best of bridges Cookbooks volume 1". I unfortunately forgot to buy the onion when i was making this and was really too lazy to go buy one after i had started the chowder so i imagine it would be even better with this addition but i have to say it was pretty darned good on it's own! Also since I seemed to be having a tough time getting the right ingredients I also managed to get garlic butter instead of the regular stuff. I love garlic though so I didn't mind :D

4 slices of bacon
1/4 cup butter
1 small onion, chopped
1/3 cup flour
3 cups milk
2 medium potatoes, peeled and diced and set in cold water
1 small green pepper, seeded and chopped
1 stalk celery, diced
1 bay leaf
1 cup half and half cream
10 oz crab meat
1 can whole kernel corn (12 0z/341 ml)
salt and pepper to taste
1tbsp chopped parsley

fry bacon until crisp, cool and crumble. Set aside. In a large saucepan, melt butter and saute onion until soft, Add flour, stir and cook gently for 1 minute. Gradually add milk, stirring constantly until thickened. Drain potatoes and add to sauce with green pepper, celery, bay leaf and cream. Simmer 35-40 minutes. Add crab, corn and bacon; heat through, season with salt and pepper. garnish each bowl with parsley. Serves 6

I also decided to try and make some small buns to go with this (creamy soup without bread just isn't the same for me) and in the end i just ended up using the pillsbury crescent rolls dough instead. It's easy and delicious but before you know it you realize that you have eaten four crescents worth of bread. Dangerous! I think that this is a great soup for a cold winters night and with the buns it's really filling! Try it out and let me know what you think!