Starface
My computer crashed like three times when I was drawing the right side of the face. Shame, I think I had the skin tones and shading much nicer at one point. After losing it twice I kind of gave up.
Cannelloni
Sunday is the day I chuck some recipes on the blog so that I don’t lose them.
Here’s the cannelloni recipe I currently use. It’s nice but not perfect, so within the next couple of weeks I’m hoping to find a new recipe to try out and post up here. Let me know if you’ve got a good one!
My biggest problem with the recipe is probably not the recipe’s fault. I’m just super slow at preparing it. The real challenge will be to find a recipe I can prepare faster.
Anyhoo, courtesy of Women’s Weekly:
Ingredients
Cannelloni
- 1kg Spinach, trimmed and coarsely chopped
- 500g ricotta cheese
- 2 eggs
- 1 1/2 cups (120g) grated parmesan
- 1/4 cup chopped fresh mint (I usually skip this)
- 2 teaspoons fresh thyme
- 2 teaspoons fresh rosemary
- 250g cannelloni tubes
Creamy Tomato Sauce
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 1 medium brown onion, chopped
- 4 cloves garlic
- 1.6kg canned, diced tomatoes
- 1/2 cup (125ml) pouring cream
- 1 teaspoon white sugar
Method
The sauce
- Heat oil in large saucepan; cook onion, stirring until softened. Add garlic.
- Add tomatoes (I frequently blend the tomatoes first for John’s benefit and to skip out on the blending later when the sauce is hot) and bring to the boil.
- Simmer for about 20 minutes or until sauce thickens slightly.
- Cool for 10 minutes, blend or process sauce with cream and sugar until smooth. (Since I’ve blended the tomatoes earlier already, I just add the cream and sugar)
The Cannelloni
- Preheat oven to 180°C
- Cook washed, drained spinach in heated large saucepan, stirring until wilted. Drain; when cool enough to handle, squeeze out excess moisture
- Combine spinach in bowl with ricotta, eggs, 1/2 cup of parmesan and the herbs. Fill cannelloni with this mixture.
- Spread a third of the sauce into a 24cm x 35cm-ish dish, top with pasta tubes then top with remaining sauce. Because instant pasta tubes are usually tiny, you can usually get a couple of layers of the pasta tubes in.
- Cook, covered, for 20 minutes. Uncover, sprinkle pasta with remaining parmesan; cook for an additional 15 minutes or until pasta is tender and cheese is browned lightly.
The supposed stats:
Prep + cook time: 1 hour (yeah right…)
Serves: 6
Photos to come ‘cos I’ve left my phone somewhere and need to fetch it.
[edit] Photos!
Tune in next week to find out what to do with the cream you’d have left over out of a 300ml container.
Doubt – Concepts and Experiments
Saturday is concepts/walkthroughs day!
Here are the sketches and scribbles that went on to become the painting I posted on Wednesday.
The original concept was all about the raaaage in the foreground character and didn’t focus so much on the background pair.
A first play with the ink.
Building on the composition and the characters.
Final thumbnail.
Some different style experiments.
Duck Photos #1
I take a lot of photos of ducks! Today I was hoping to dig up the first ducks-in-trees photos I ever took but I couldn’t find them 🙁
Anyhow, here’s a pair of wood duck parents and their well-sheltered young. Taken in August 2010.
The Disco Banjo
The first of a couple of builds for which I collaborated with my father (ie, palmed off the hard work to).
The Concept
The concept for this comes, of course, from KoL. The epic weapon of the disco bandit is a banjo crafted out of a disco ball. Serendipitously, just as the idea to create the thing came to me, a fellow student at life-drawing classes showed me some photos of instruments made out of food tins. I started googling around and found that banjos made of cookie tins are actually quite widely made by artists and traveling musicians (the can itself is a great storage device) and there are many guides to making them around the place.
Eventually, my internet travels led me to a site explaining how to create a banjo out of a gourd, and this became the basis of the disco banjo.
The Making
I bought a disco ball from Cheap-as-Chips and peeled off mirror sections until I found the seam along which the hemispheres of the ball were connected. Lots of photos from this stage, cos I had a lot of fun with it! Except when the thing first split open and noxious plasticy fumes filled my lungs.
Lifting off the first piece.
A stanley knife was sufficient to break into the plastic.
Leaving a bisected disco ball on a career-disco bandit’s keyboard is like leaving a severed horse head on someone’s pillow.
Testing the resonance of the ball using some fishing wire, a spare violin bridge and some newspaper.
Once the disco ball was dealt with, I purchased a drum head, banjo strings and guitar pegs and drafted some timber guides for my father to do the woodwork.
Disco bongo. An 8″ drum head fits perfectly over the half-disco ball.
The neck.
A piece to go inside the banjo body in order to support the shape of the disco ball and provide a mounting point for the neck.
Preparing a hole for the timber to go through. I used a piece of paper of the same size/shape as the cross-section of the wood as my guide.
Sadly there are no more progress shots from here on as I passed everything over to my dad and he assembled the whole thing with expert craftsmanship.
Suddenly, it’s done!
I used the many left over mirror sections to decorate the drum head.
Extra notes
The tailpiece is a separate piece of timber, screwed from the outside of the ball to the bracer piece on the inside. It also sits over the rim of the drum to hold things in place.
The banjo is fretless and tuned in fifths as I played ‘cello way back when.
Doubt
Blaugust is back, which means more blogging! I’m hoping to be able to provide lots of content this time, with the crutch of “old art” to help me fulfill that goal.
Click for larger view!
This piece is from my life drawing classes last year. The assignment involved drawing a self-portrait involving three figures composed in some kind of narrative. We were also supposed to take stylistic lead from another artist.
I chose to emulate Marlene Dumas’ ink drawings as I was at the time experimenting quite heavily with watercolours and inks. I combined her use of unpredictable washes with the sharply defined edges that can be attained by using masking fluid.
I got quite wrapped up in the narrative and the symbolism. I think our lecturer was specifically addressing me when she cautioned us against turning the assignment into an illustrative work. And although the assortment of (mostly) round shapes in the background on the right seem quite arbitrarily chosen, there is a meaning attached to each.
Invader Cookies
Shortbread dough probably wasn’t the best suited to this, but I like shortbread.
