Hey! Another post!

So, that paper airplane painting I mentioned? Finished it! It didn't turn out too badly, either.

New year, new classes, new new new...

Could also be titled 'what I like to do when I don't want to do what I have to do', but that's a long title.

So. This upcoming week I have the first projects of the year due. In one class we are doing cover illustrations for Peter Pan. Tons of fun, really. I'm loving designing it. sketching it, doing color roughs and noodling about and composing the whole deal... It's just really intimidating to sit down and paint what I've designed XD Here's one of the face sketches for Peter, though. I think I'm getting to about the right amount of smug. Almost...

The other painting is a still life. My teacher in that class gave us a list of requirements involving a paper airplane made of college-ruled blue-lined paper, and said go. The exercise is supposed to help us get familiar with acrylic paints, which I've not really used before, unless you count using the really crappy stuff in high school a few times. Which was fun, but it's been a really long time, and I honestly hadn't the foggiest idea what I was doing back then. Anyway, I got my list of requirements, and sat down at home, made my paper airplane, started setting up my still life... and proceeded to throw the plane against the wall for five minutes. My teacher laughed when he saw my photo reference and said go for it.

So, here I am, down to crunch time on both of these, getting a little overwhelmed and more than a little scared of this new paint, and so what do I do to relieve the tension?

Tadaaaaa~
I figure I might as well do something that is not for a grade as my first foray into the new medium instead of risking my life, livelihood and reputation before the class on the first thing. Also... come on. The bowler hat is going to be so much more fun to paint than all those stripes.
Seriously.


Also, later, I have a huge explanation with many pretty photos as to where I've been for over a month. It was good. I promise. ;) Some of you kind of already know, but I have pictures of New York and me in a pretty dress and all and I want to show off. So there.

Quickly update- My behatted lizard has a background ;)

Oops, could have sworn I'd taken a shot with just the flat color step... oh well. See what I'm doing with my day off? NOT HOMEWORK! Yay!

Aaaand... done! He's such a posh professor type looking sort of skeleton raptor thing. :)

There'll be a better scan up eventually. Better scan is up! I'm thinking I might enter this one into a local art show, though. I'd been planning something else, but this turned out so nicely and in theme... should i put him up for sale?

The Christmas ornaments are out!

Yay! It's the holidays! As an exercise in class today we drew Christmas ornaments. I really need to do more of this. It was a ton of fun :)

On a mildly related side note, I had kind of a cool thought yesterday, and a mid-holidays personal resolution.
It is so cool (and sadly under-noticed) that in America our 'holiday season' kicks off with none other than Thanksgiving, the holiday dedicated to gathering together those nearest and dearest to you and counting your blessings. What a way to start out the best part of the year, really.
I've resolved to do my best to let this influence every bit of my holiday season.

Cool little moment. Maybe its a little silly, but it was a bit of a perspective change.

Anyway, hope you all had a terrific Thanksgiving, and that your Christmas preparations go well and any traveling you do goes safely and if anything goes wrong it's the sort that gives you good stories to tell at the other end ;)

Landscape, continued...

So, after I had the composition and my basic color scheme figured out, it was time to get over my qualms and start the piece. I should have taken more in progress shots, so you all could see how ugly an oil painting starts out, but I was actually focused, and didn't think of it. Oops.

Initially I had this piece planned for a larger canvas that was about the proportion of those initial sketches, but because of time constraints I had to do some quick problem solving and figure out how to make it work on a smaller canvas.

I've done a piece before with this really lovely vignette effect that I thought might look really nice if I got the right level of detail into the interior of the painting, and frame the image, leading the eye in deeper to the image. I think in the end it actually worked, and my teacher seemed to get it. He actually gave me a couple of suggestions to make it a little more successful that I'm going to try once the paint sets a bit more.

Anyway, with all that prep the painting actually went really smoothly, especially for anything oil paint related and me... up till this point. And then something about the composition just really started bothering me.

At this point I remembered a post I'd read by Justin Gerard about something Rembrandt reportedly did- whenever he got stuck on a painting, instead of pushing through and, like I always do, risking ruining the whole thing, he would do small studies of the painting to figure out the problems. Gerard picked up the idea... but digitally. So, I decided to give it a try.

It actually helped a ton!

Many hours later and a little more back and forth and I'm actually really happy with where it's heading... and i've hit that point where the fear sets in. You know you're close, and you have that last set of details you want to add, and you know they're absolutely crucial to the painting.

You also know that at this point you have every potential to absolutely destroy everything you've done so far.

So, I took one last photo, and went back to my trusty Paint Tool SAI and started messing about again. It really saved my tail. It doesn't seem like much, but this was the first substantial composition change I'd made to the painting since I'd come up with it in the first place. It is much better for it, really, but there's really no way it would have happened without the digital 'inter-medium'...

And after another few hours of touch-ups and fiddling, here's my final piece. :)

I am rather pleased with the end result. There are certainly things that need to be fixed, but on the whole I think I'm finally getting the hang of oils :D

Landscape in Progress

Finally, some original art! Yay! (that I'm not afraid or ashamed to show! Yay!)

To get things rolling again around here, I'm going to start out with a couple posts on the progress of this oil paint landscape. First stage- reference. Color, composition, material, whatever you are referencing, find it. It's always best to get your own shots, so you'll be certain to get just what you need, but in a pinch the internet sometimes has something close. I can say I definitely didn't take that lovely foggy shot, but it ended up helping me a ton in my color roughs.

 

      

Also, on-site studies, even better than any photograph ever. I'm terrible at them, but they still help a ton.

Next stage, composition sketches. I struggle with color a lot, so I keep them in greyscale and leave the color out of the mix entirely. Also, I'm really coming to love doing almost all of my fiddly composition work digitally. It seems to save a lot of headaching.

These are a few of the best that I thought up. I still struggle with this a bit. I used to do this part all in my head, which is problematic in a lot of ways. It's like doing math in your head. Yeah, you might do it alright most of the time, but then sometimes you're wrong, or you miss something, and you won't know where or when it was because you never wrote it down. So, I'm trying to train myself out of a very bad habit and actually draw out my thought process. My art really is improving as I do so.

Next comes the color studies. This is my favorite digital trick in the pre-painting stage.

See? So simple! You just take your favorite composition and go over and over and over again with all your different color potentials. Which is the same thing as you'd be doing by hand, except in this case you don't have to worry about the composition constantly accidentally changing on you, too. Fewer happy accidents, but far fewer frustrations as well. 

Aaaand I think that's it for tonight. Next post I'll get into the actual painting :) I'll have to see the finished thing in the light of day, but I think I actually like this one.

Pita!!

Not of the Hunger Games variety.
So, yesterday was shawarma. Today I talk about how I discovered my oven could get up to five hundred degrees.
It was deliberate.
We made pita bread, to put our delicious shawarma and tahini spread into. Using this lovely recipe we discovered on epicurious.com, we successfully made a double recipe of sixteen lovely light brown puffy hollow pita pockets :)

1 (1/4-ounce) package active dry yeast (2 1/2 teaspoons)

1 teaspoon honey

1 1/4 cups warm water (105–115°F)

2 cups bread flour or high-gluten flour, plus additional for kneading

1 cup whole-wheat flour

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

1 teaspoon salt

Cornmeal for sprinkling baking sheets (I just lightly rubbed flour over the sheets)

As far as the steps, we followed this recipe pretty religiously and it worked wonders. It's a bit long and involved, but I looked through several recipes and it is not at all the longest or most involved of all the recipes even just on the front page.

As far as the recipe, we used an even half and half mixture of unbleached flour and whole wheat flour, and simply used three cups of it.

Well, we used six, because we doubled the recipe.

It was a lot of pita.
We planned on having a lot of leftovers.

It's not quite going as planned.

Regardless, the recipe goes as follows.

"Stir together yeast, honey, and 1/2 cup warm water in a large bowl, then let stand until foamy, about 5 minutes. (If mixture doesn't foam, discard and start over with new yeast.)While yeast mixture stands, stir together flours in another bowl. Whisk 1/2 cup flour mixture into yeast mixture until smooth, then cover with plastic wrap and let stand in a draft-free place at warm room temperature until doubled in bulk and bubbly, about 45 minutes. Stir in oil, salt, remaining 3/4 cup warm water, and remaining 2 1/2 cups flour mixture until a dough forms.Turn out dough onto a floured surface and knead, working in just enough additional flour to keep dough from sticking, until dough is smooth and elastic, 8 to 10 minutes. Form dough into a ball and put in an oiled large bowl, turning to coat. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and let dough rise in draft-free place at warm room temperature until doubled in bulk, about 1 hour."

Punch down dough and cut into 8 pieces. Form each piece into a ball. Flatten 1 ball, then roll out into a 6 1/2- to 7-inch round on floured surface with a floured rolling pin. Transfer round to 1 of 2 baking sheets lightly sprinkled with cornmeal. Make 7 more rounds in same manner, arranging them on baking sheets. Loosely cover pitas with 2 clean kitchen towels (not terry cloth) and let stand at room temperature 30 minutes.

-----Set oven rack in lower third of oven and-----

-----remove other racks-----

 

Preheat oven to 500°F.

Transfer 4 pitas, 1 at a time, directly onto oven rack. Bake until just puffed and pale golden, about 2 minutes. Turn over with tongs and bake 1 minute more. Cool pitas on a cooling rack 2 minutes, then stack and wrap loosely in a kitchen towel to keep pitas warm. Bake remaining 4 pitas in same manner. Serve warm."

 

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm tastey.

 mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm tastier.

 tahini sauce.

Shawarma chicken. Best stuff in the whole world, in my humble opinion. I will definitely be repeating this experience.
Tomorrow or the next day, I will be posting art! Yay!

Shwaaaarrrrrmaaa...

...for those of you who have seen 'How it Should Have Ended' for the Avengers.

Or, on other words, shawarma.

I have an awesome boyfriend, by the way. After seeing the Avengers, most boys went around quoting Iron Man and pretending to be Captain America. Well, no- ...okay, yes, there was and is some of that. But. But, my favorite part is when he comes back and says that he wants to go see it again at the local discount theatre and then come back and make shawarma.
Of course, college life being what it is, things didn't go quite as planned, and we didn't get to do things quite in that order.
The actual making of the shawarma meat was stretched over two days (which didn't hurt the marinade in the least, I must say), and then we had to wait another two days to make the pita bread to put the stuff in, and we won't even get to eat the sandwiches until tomorrow! However, we've gotten to sample everything along the way and it all appears a smashing success.
We just haven't had a chance to assemble our heroic meal yet.
See what I did there?
I should be ashamed of myself, shouldn't I?
I'm not.


On to shawarma!
Because I was cooking as part of a team, I didn't do my typical recipe deconstruction, so I have actual recipes to refer you to today!
The shawarma recipe comes from Wendy on allrecipes.com

• 1/2 cup malt vinegar
• 1/4 cup plain yogurt
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1 teaspoon mixed spice
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground cardamom
• 8 skinless, boneless chicken thighs
•  
• 1/2 cup tahini
• 1/4 cup plain yogurt
• 1/2 teaspoon minced garlic
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
• salt and pepper to taste
•  
• 4 medium tomatoes, thinly sliced
• 1/2 cup sliced onion
• 4 cups shredded lettuce
• 8 pita bread rounds

Okay... I did change a few things. For instance, I had only a couple little sauce packets of malt vinegar that I'd picked up at a fast food place ages ago, so I had to use the tail ends of some white balsamic and some rice vinegar that I had about.
I just realized what an odd college student I am.
Oh well.
Probably could have used extra light olive oil just as well as vegetable oil in here, as the vinegar would have more than made up for any flavor discrepancies.
Also, I used chicken breasts, and had already chunked them about half-fist-sized for portion control earlier. Worked just fine.
One last note before we move on- cardamom is amazing. This cannot be understated. It is the miracle spice in this recipe. Wonderful.
Moving on.

As the recipe says, you put the chicken and the marinade in the baking dish, cover it, and stick it in the fridge. It says at least four hours to overnight. I say, if you go with that 'at least four hours' bit, you're crazy. Overnight is a minimum. We actually had to let it sit until i think around noon... I'll have to double check with him on that, the day was a bit hectic. However, the chicken had actually taken on a desaturated sort of color from the marinade by the time we got it in the oven.
Now, I'm not saying it would be a good idea to marinate it for two days or anything! Heavens no! Just don't make the mistake of going half-way on this. I promise you, it's worth the wait.

Oh... Aaaaand with that, it's almost one in the morning, I'm rambling, and I have cycling early...today. I'll continue this later ;)

I'll talk about the perfect sauce and post some pictures with the next blog!