Archive Raiding: Art Scans Batch #1

Back in a galaxy far, far away, I took Art, Craft and Design for the Junior Cert. (kind of the Irish GCSEs). Many years later, I've still got all the work I did for it tucked away in a big, orange A2 folder; under a sofa, if you must know.

The best of what's in there I've already posted years ago on deviantArt, but there's a whole lot more to it than that; stuff that I haven't seen in over a decade. Now that I've got a half-decent scanner to use, I thought it might be fun to finally revisit it.



Ah, this is pretty nice. One of the many, many pieces of final project preparatory work we'll encounter, I'm using a mix of colouring pencils and paint here. Not much in the way of shading, but I was pretty early into the project here, judging by the date.



Jumping back a little further, this I would have dawn some time in late 1998, before I'd picked flowers as the sort-of central focus of my project. (Boy, did I get some stick for that :D). Butterflies, and I've gotta say a couple of cool-looking ones here, I ended up incorporating quite a bit into my final pieces though. Cartoon fish, not so much.

I do really like the expression the second one from the bottom has though. Oh, and the fish just above him to the left; that's a nice little action pose there.

Scan number #3 is: some more flowers. We've got some more mixed media going on here too with the top two being both done with pastels and the rest with colouring pencils (or just a pencil in the case of the middle right one). Not great really, and no shading again, which elicited endless complaining from my teacher (but she was right).

And finally, *yeesh* it's my first attempt at life-sketching from October '97 - something we did about once a month using classmates as models. It's something that I never got particularly good at, but then it's something that never interested me a whole lot either.

Oh, and to be clear, none of these sketches are in in any way representative of the girls that were my class. They were all significantly less ogre-like in reality. :)

deviantArt Updates 26/11/13

 

A few new doodles, as seen on that hot new Tumblr blog everyone's talking about.:D

Groupees Collection Template

I've bought a fair few Groupees bundles over the last few years, but it's only in the last couple of months that I've gotten around to downloading most of them.

Now, one of the things that sets Groupee apart from some of the other bundle people is that they dabble heavily in music. Even in non music-focused bundles, you're sure to find at least a couple of EPs or albums tucked away somewhere. Those are fine, but a lot of their bundles also include "special collections" of tracks from a particular artist, which all seem to consist of tracks from the artist's other releases (original MP3 tags still in tact) and a random band-related image to act as the cover art.

As someone who (pathetically) takes pride in their digital music collection, there was no way I was going to add these ad hoc compilations to it, at least now without "fixing" them first. To get than done, I needed to make some cover art for these things. The simplest way of doing that, I decided, was to make a template I could throw over all those random images to turn them into something a bit more appropriate. :

Ta-dah! Yeah, kind of a quick and dirty effort (using a recently retired logo), but I think it served its purpose reasonably well:

Ah, magnetoperfection.gif

I'll pop the Paint Shop Pro files up on MediaFire in case anyone else has any use for them. [Link]

Jack-o'-lantern 2013

Carved this guy out yesterday. I’d just started when my knife slipped, leaving that huge gash going down from the left eye. Rather than moving to the other side, I decided I’d try turning it into a scar and working the rest of the features around it. It won't be winning any prizes, but a pretty decent save, I'd say.

Cooking: Butternut Squash and Sweet Potato Soup

Checking the date on the photo above, I've had the ingredients for this soup scrawled down for almost a year now. With the method fresh again in my mind after making a new batch tonight, it seems like a good time to finally write this one up.

I'm not sure why our small, local supermarket started stocking sweet potatoes and butternut squashes a couple of years ago - I'm pretty sure I'm one of the only two or three people who buys them, but having picked them up, I was determined to make them into soup for some reason (personally, I blame the weird abundance of pumpkin soup in Zelda). After a good few attempts, this is the one I settled on. It's a hearty, lightly spicy soup that strikes a nice balance between sweet and savoury.

(If I do say so myself. :D)

Ingredients

• 1 butternut squash
• 3 large sweet potatoes
• 2 medium onions
• 4 medium sticks of celery
• 2 1/4 pints stock
• dried coriander
• mild chilli powder
• ground sea salt
• ground black pepper
• extra virgin olive oil

Method

1. Peel the sweet potatoes and peel and remove the seeds from the the butternut squash.
2. Cut both into 0.5-1 inch cubes and spread them out evenly in a large, flat oven pan, on top of a piece of greaseproof paper or parchment.
3. Give the diced veg a generous sprinkling of olive oil followed by a good, even sprinkling of the coriander and mild chilli powder, and a few grinds of salt and pepper.
4. Toss the veg around gently to make sure everything gets a good coating of seasoning. (I use a big serving spoon for this)
5. Put the the diced veg. cooking in the oven at about 200ºC.
6. Meanwhile, peel the onions and the backs of the celery stalks (to remove the stringy bits). Dice the onions and celery pretty finely and sweat them in some more olive oil in a large pot.
7. When the butternut squash and sweet potato pieces are soft enough to stick a fork through easily add them to the pot with the sweated onions.
8. Now if you've got a decent hand blender here's where you'd mix everything in the pot together and blend the mixture into a smooth mash. Failing that, as long as you've diced the onions and celery finely enough, you can totally get away with just mashing everything thoroughly with a potato masher here.
9. Next, pour in the stock and stir well to mix it together with the mashed veg. I usually just use chicken stock cubes and 2 1/4 pints is three stock cubes worth of Knorr's finest.
10. Now bring the soup to the boil, giving it the occasional stir.
11. Once it's boiling, reduce the heat and let it simmer it for 15-20 minutes, stirring it regularly. While it's simmering, give it a taste. It's probably going to need more seasoning, so add more salt, pepper and spices as needed and give it a good stir to mix them in.
12. If you want to thicken up the soup you can dissolve a few tablespoons of flour in some water and add it here. Make sure to dissolve the flour in the water thoroughly first though and to stir the soup continuously until the flour-water mixture dissolves in it completely. Otherwise you're going to end up with little balls of flour floating in the soup.
13. Enjoy! (Hopefully :D)

Clearoutageddon Part Four: The Toy Show Has a Lot to Answer For

When I was a kid, back when we only had two television channels, one of the TV highlights of the year was The Late Late Toy Show: a two and a half hour orgy of toys being paraded in front of you and even better, you got to stay up late to watch it. One of the definite lowlights though was when the host would make an impassioned plea to parents to not forget the gift of reading come Christmas time, before subjecting us to a good fifteen minutes of nerdy kids reviewing the dullest-sounding books imaginable. (That and those stage school brats singing and dancing every half hour; fuck that bullshit.) While my eyes might have been glazing over this segment, that obviously wasn't the case for some of my relatives.

Without fail, I'd get a bunch of books every year. And that was cool, until I turned about ten, after which point I never got one that wasn't educational in some way ever again. As you can imagine, in the face of video games and Lego and the like, educational Christmas gifts (once said relatives were safely away) got tossed to the side and never thought of again. Fast forward fifteen years and most of these were still cluttering up my parents' place, gathering dust. But no more, for the time of Clearoutageddon was at hand!



So, out of the numerous books I got over the years, this DK Encyclopaedia was the only one I ever wanted beforehand, and the last one I enjoyed or got any use out of. I got it for Christmas '95, just in time for a schools quiz I was taking part in a few weeks later. Unfortunately, the questions there turned out to be more about pop culture and current events than science and history, and the weeks I spent swotting up on various subjects from the encyclopaedia went entirely to waste. But I did get a free pen.

The illustrated bible I got another year. It's actually quite nice, but I can't say I was particularly thrilled to unwrap it at the time.



Engendering a similar lack of excitement was this this illustrated history book. Well, at least until I had a look inside, and discovered that...



THERE WERE BOOBS!

You know, I sometimes genuinely wonder how differently my life would have turned out if I focused more on the knowledge contained in this book than the nudity. :D



After I got to secondary school and started learning French, various European language books started showing up at Christmas. I remember getting one of these Usborne books in English when I was younger. I quite liked the art style and the hidden rubber ducks throughout, but even that couldn't get me to learn any French of my own free will, or German for that mater. It was tough enough getting to grips with a third language, I certainly didn't need to get started on a fourth.



Not that I could explain that to the gift-givers though.

Also, a Geography counterpart to the World History book that proved to be, sadly, boob-free.



This lot are a bit different, in that I bought most of them for myself. Hey, remember the Filofax? No? Me neither, but the bottom four books here all sought to cash in on that. They were designed to fit into a sort of Filofax for children: a "Fun Fax" if you will.

Possibly the dumbest idea ever.

Knowing nothing about faxes of any sort, I  picked these up on various school trips because I thought they looked promisingly funny/scary. Boy, did I get a lesson in judging a book by it's (detachable) cover.

At the time I leant the two horror ones to a buddy. I don't remember getting any feedback afterwards, but knowing him, there's no way on Earth he possibly enjoyed these, especially Burning Secret which I remember having a sappy friendship between two teenage girls at its core and a distinct lack of gratuitous gun violence.

While we're on the subject of horror, one book that did genuinely freak me out when I was younger was the one in the top right: a selection of (purportedly) real life tales of the supernatural that I bought at a school book fair in '96. Looking back now, I'm pretty sure everything in there was complete toss, but that didn't stop the story about the waxworks coming to life from scaring the shit out of me for weeks on end, and holy shit, that back cover...

Brrrrrr.

Purchased in the same one-off book fair by my brother was Into the 21st Century, a collection of short stories by viewers of The Den (in it's lame, post Zig and Zag incarnation). Hearing the shitty stories my classmates and I would come up for English class week in/week out, I think I made the right choice in steering clear of this.



Finally here, we have a novelization of the first Ninja Turtles movie - a nice little gift my dad picked up given my obsession with the cartoon at the time. As crazy as I was about that though, I've never actually seen the movie, or any of the Turtles movies. Not that I had any opportunity at the time mind. Cinema trips were never something we did, we didn't have a VCR until later and, as far as I know, none of those movies got shown on TV over here. Just think: I went through my entire childhood totally unaware of the Ninja Rap. As for the book itself, I don't remember a bit of it now. I think a Blu-ray purchase might be in order.

More after the jump...

Cooking: Cheese and Onion Soup with Cheese Bread

Having had a disgusting block of rubbery, Jameson-flavoured cheddar in the fridge for about two weeks, I finally decided to do something about it tonight. I was thinking macaroni and cheese at first, but this thing was so rank there's no way that wouldn't have been equally vile. No, what I really needed was some way cut down its sickly sweet faux whiskey flavour, and I thought hiding it away in a cheese bread might just do the trick.

After a quick search I landed on this recipe, which proved nice and easy and used up the vast majority of the stuff. I did still have a bit left over though, so with my bread in the oven, I decided that I'd mix the rest of it with some regular cheddar and try making a cheese and onion soup to go with it.

Aside from replacing three quarters of the milk with stock (I though all milk would make a bit too rich), I went with this recipe for the soup. Well, until I decided it wouldn't yield much soup at all and that I'd double the amount of stock and milk going in. That, of course, meant I didn't have enough flour in there for it to thicken so I ended up having to add a couple of tablespoons more (dissolved in water) before I could add the cheese.

Despite the last-minute alterations, the resulting soup was delicious - nice and creamy, with a tasty, well-balanced flavour, with only a hint of faux Jameson nastiness. Success! The bread, despite containing the vast majority of the cheese had even less of it. To be honest it was a bit bland; ideally I think you'd need to much stronger-flavoured cheese in there than cheddar. I did enjoy the crispiness it leant the outside crust though, and hey, it was fucking edible, which is more than I can say for the stuff that was sitting in my fridge a couple of hours previously. :D