CoCoNuTs II

First of all, a certain someone said something about the crumbs on my cake platter so I had to do a re-do of the photograph. Notice, there are two more slices gone (I had to convince a total stranger to take a piece last night and then I had another this afternoon). I am bringing this into work tomorrow to share with the faculty.





Second of all, I made it to the second item of my ambitious list, coconut chicken fingers and tangy apricot sauce.

I attempted to do a double layer for extra crispiness, but things didn't work out so well I believe because I baked these babies. So, see below I have my preparation line....




And, the final product!




Third of all, I will make strong attempts at making my Alice in Wonderland sugar cookies this week, but the rest of my night is dedicated to grading homework, classwork, and projects!

CocoNuts

Vanilla Cake (out of a box) + Vanilla Icing (from scratch) + Angel Coconut Flakes = a pretty good cake, if I say so myself, I just wish I had someone to share it with!

More work done today!

I wish I wasn't limited in the size you get to see this in, even clicking on it doesn't make it large enough for you to see the detail I've worked so hard on. Oh well........ I worked on my mysterious girl, but I've still yet to place her secret in her hands, but they are ready and waiting....... soon enough, soon enough. I wish someone would employ me and make this my job....

The beginnings of a bigger project...

This is the beginnings of a bigger project I envisioned a while ago, but I couldn't resist sharing!
Leave some comments, folks, just say hi!

Photography experiment

Click on the pictures! This past weekend I played with the V-Girls. They were my models and inspiration as I played photographer and experimented with depth perception and close-ups.


These flowers really pop in the photos, they almost look superimposed because of their color.


Wood pile


Canoe with the girls off in the distance.


Fallen tree


Love this photo. One day she'll be able to climb that tree.


The other medium of the day.


If only I purposely composed this picture with all these shades of purple, what can I say, the clothes were clean and the shoes "findable".

Peony

One of my students told me about how you can load user-created brushes into Photoshop and that got me thinking about the brushes that I use in Illustrator.

I'm a big fan of the pencil brush, but after brief internet research including looking at the link he sent me, I realized I could create my own brush and I did.

I made an art brush of a peony petal and used it to help me draw this peony bud. The sepals are the work of a simple pen drawing, but I used a brush for each of the peony petals and rotated when needed.

This is just the first thing that I tested out today ( I love flowers can you tell?) and I may get the chance to do some more work to it, but I am really supposed to try very hard to do some lesson planning as my real job starts Monday, when I will be teaching FIVE different business classes at a local high school for pretty much the rest of the school year. Needless to say, I really should focus my creativity on trying to make my lessons more interesting and exciting, but drawing and designing keeps creeping into my mind.

BUT I will be channeling some of this creativity into at least one of my classes (yay for Marketing!) as they are "marketing" the summer reading book fair with a theme of "Alice in Wonderland" and I am going to attempt to make them a special Alice themed dessert. Given my latest excursions with sugar cookies and icing, you see where this all stemmed from. So stay posted for some more culinary creativity in the future.



P.S. Leave some comments, folks- don't be shy! Give me some inspiration, challenges of things to create! Thanks for reading to all my regular visitors, you know who you are!

P.P.S. With regard to my sister's jewelry store graphics that I created for the Spring 2009 season and the colors that I researched, they have been in all the magazines I have received as the new color combination. One mag even included a bright blue with the combo which I can appreciate, I might have to use it some how- colors are sometimes inspiring all on their own!

New background!

You may have noticed by new background! Yes, I am so excited I figured it out today. What I did was create my own block in illustrator using the orchids I had drawn before for a pattern for the background which by itself looks like this, uploaded it to Photobucket and then used Dreamweaver to figure out the appropriate code and spot to slip into the html editing section of the blog. Yay! I just love how my black and white orchids float on the background now. So, if you ever want help creating your own custom background, I'm your girl! I'm still learning how to use Dreamweaver, though, and I have a feeling its going to take some time before I could launch anything real, but you know what they say, baby steps-- yay for backgrounds!



P.S. Orchids are my one of my favorite types of flowers!