Tag Archives: fruit

Edible Mandala

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As always, symmetry gets a bit ragged around the edges when the center has any imprecision.

Usually I wouldn’t post food on this blog even though I’m considered a pretty good home cook and my food tends to be photogenic when I put forth the effort (I do post food pics on Instagram @hubris_and_smoke) but this one is a mandala so I totally have to share it.

Alas, the picture is all the remains after I fed it to my Mom for Mother’s Day. It was a big hit, and fairly simple to make. The crust is basically a sugar cookie and the sauce is a simple cream cheese icing. This one is gluten free so the cookie was a bit delicate but that’s why I made it in a pie pan.

Peach Love

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Hints of Eric Carle in this peach

I’m not really allowed to discuss what this card means just yet. Perhaps I can come back later and elaborate. But I made this delicious peach card: it’s a peach, and a heart, and a star. Tissue paper, butcher paper, matte medium, on medium card stock. I love how the colors on the peach came out. It gives me a lot of ideas for using these materials to create other cool colors and textures.

Falling

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The redemptive power of produce.

I am completely satisfied with this comic. The fruits, the vegetables, the script, the visual juxtapositions, and the layers of symbols. The story is more hopeful than some of Bonnie Jo’s work; that’s why I used the mason jars in the last panel, even though they were destroyed by a fire. For that narrator, they were an aspect of home, and even though her house burned down, she’s still creating this sense of family out of these men, so that a camper, a garage, a tent, and a garden become a home.

It’s Not a Table Set for Ants

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These items are still too big for daily use by ants.

My actual kitchen table is 50% kitchen table and 50% workbench/junk drawer/stuff The Man doesn’t know what to do with, but I can set some lovely miniature tables with dishes and fruit and vegetables. Last night, I made this cute bowl and a single lemon and 3 roses and a vase, all out of the little scraps of clay left over from other projects. I didn’t fire them last night because it was pretty late, here they are now. My tiny vase-making skills could use improvement, but I think I’ll try some other, more complicated kinds of flowers and fancier vases in the future.

Yesterday I sent what I believe to be the final files for the Bonnie Jo Campbell comic book to the printers. I can scarcely believe it, but they should exist as physical objects in meatspace within the next week or so. I’m terrified there’s a mistake somewhere, or that I could have made them better with more work. It’s a strange balance, since I started this blog with the intention of giving up the drive for perfection, but somehow, print seems more momentous than pixels.

Up Close with a Wild Strawberry

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Mmm…nodules. This photo makes it look a lot juicier than it probably is in real life.

The Japanese Tea Garden at Golden Gate Park would be one of the most beautiful places in the world, except for all the tourists. The experience of drinking tea there is pretty much the exact opposite of what I think of when I think of a Japanese tea garden. But it can’t be helped. It’s a public garden. It costs $8 to get in and $8.50 for a cup of matcha tea, but it’s a public garden.

Still, it’s pretty beautiful. These wild strawberries were busting out all over and the small details were just as astonishing as the large ones. There are a week’s worth of perfect macros, at least. It may take a while to identify all the flowers.

Another interesting thing I noticed was that, when this photo was uploaded to the Internet as a JPG, the colors were all wrong and it looked terrible. Only a PNG file maintained the original values.

Gardens in the Rain

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This image has been cropped and color corrected.

I went out to photograph some tiny tomatoes in the rain, but I didn’t realize that the reason all my macrophotography has been looking weird lately is that there is a filter on the lens and the filter was filthy. That accounts for the soft focus-looking bit on the right side of the image. Still, cropped, it looks nice, I think. This is the peach tree in my back yard. It’s been back there for year but never managed to do much growing, because it is apparently tasty to caterpillars. So I’ve been super-vigilant about caterpillar murder (I use a bacteria that actually murders the caterpillar for me; I’m not much of a killer) and now here we have the testimony: tiny peaches bursting forth from the dying flower.

Now, apparently, I have to start killing ants before they eat the baby peaches?

I would have liked to have drawn a comic tonight, but I think my allergies have achieve sentience and are building a more enlightened society in my sinus cavity. I tried to appease them with some soup from the hip ramen shop downtown, but I suspect I may have consumed some MSG, because now my temples are as seized up as the rest of my face.

Dimensionality: Still Life with Pachyderm

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It seems like some of my difficulties with perspective stem from the condition of strabismus exotropia, which I’ve had since childhood. In short, I have no depth perception. Drawing dimensionality can be a challenge, but modeling seems much easier. Taking a break from writing my last night on retreat, I decided to go 3D with Sculpey.

The fruits of my labors. The quarter is for scale. I didn't have a banana because I made pancakes out of them.

The fruits of my labors. The quarter is for scale. I didn’t have a real banana because I made pancakes out of them.

Since the protagonist of my graphic novel is so influenced by turn-of-the-century boys’ colonialist adventure novels (this week I’ve read The Son of Tarzan and King Solomon’s Mines) an elephant seemed like the obvious place to start.

Look at his little tail! And his little tusks!

Look at his little tail! And his little tusks!

Besides, elephants just make people happy. They’re so big! But they’re smart! And social!

The other side of the elephant

The other side of the elephant

My little tusker is a proud bull, bearing the magnificent ivory appendages of his people.

There are plusses and minuses to working in miniature. I tend to feel more comfortable with small detail, but it’s so much easier to screw up, particularly to screw up something you’ve already gotten right. His tail must have fallen down ten times before he went into the oven, but it’s standing up pretty well now.

The banana is a bit lumpy for my taste. Maybe it's organic or something. I learned how to coil pots like this when I was a little girl.

The banana is a bit lumpy for my taste. Maybe it’s organic or something. I learned how to coil pots like this when I was a little girl.

Once Tantor was finished, I felt the motivation to continue, but with something simpler, so I went for an apple, which quite naturally led to a pear and a banana. From there, it made sense to coil a little fruit bowl.

Still life with modeling medium

Still life with modeling medium

I’m not ashamed to say it: Kawaii! Squee! Little tiny things!

Well, I wrote 3500 words today, meaning I’ve drafted approximately half the story this week. I’d hoped to get further, but 15,000 words is not a bad output for 4 1/2 days’ work.