Damned if I'm gonna miss a class

I may have been sick this morning, but damned if I'm going to miss my cake decorating class that I paid for and of which there are only three! (First one doesn't count, it was just an orientation!) Tonight we did roses, clowns, and other drop flowers. After my first practice clown sitting upright, we had to do one laying down and she said "Try to cross the arms in front of him so he doesn't look dead." To which I said, "Maybe I want him to look dead." So, I made a clown that looked like he had been thrown out of a 10 story building (sorry, to all the clowns that read my blog). Had I colored some frosting red I would have went to town with the whole display, but instead I just scooped him up and threw him back into the container to mix in again. But roses I like, so here are a few pics that I took at the end of class...

This is the second one I did and you can kind of tell that the icing in my bag was transitioning from the cream to the pink, not entirely on purpose, but it has a cool effect....


These next two are a more solid pink and after a little more practice. I have to say I wasn't a fan of my icing consistency because it gave me a kind of ruffled/ragged look on the end of the petals- but then again it does give it a peony look with those edges...hmm... peonies are one of my top favorite flowers, I definitely have something to experiment with this weekend....

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!