I love the personalities… almost like one is the reverse of the other!
I decided to do thing-a-day this month, and I’ve already missed a day and it’s only day 4. I’ll do a makeup day for day 2 at some point. So this is my thing-a-day, and also my illustration friday, the first one I’ve managed to do this year.
Oh, and if you missed it, be sure to check out the ‘how to make octopus cookies’ from yesterday! I finally got the tutorial up…
For a friend’s baby shower, we did an octopus theme (the mom was having twins, so the theme was “she’s going to need 8 arms!” These cookies match the invitation.
Here are the cookies I made as shower favors. They weren’t overly difficult, but a tad time consuming. I’ll post the recipe in a later post if anyone is interested, but basically it’s a non-leavened sugar cookie, covered with royal icing. With small skewers for sticks, inserted before the cookie is baked.
The octopus is drawn on freehand, and it doesn’t take artistic talent… Everyone is cute, unique, and just a little bit ‘wopty’!
See below for the how to.
First just ice the white circles. There’s many good tutorials for this, but they generally involve using a stiffer icing around the edge, and filling in the center with a more runny version. I didn’t do that neat a job with mine. Let that harden before you do the octopus.
Here’s a great tutorial from Wisdom of the Moon on working with royal icing, with a ton of pictures, so you can get the idea.
You’ll need your royal icing to be a little runny (but not as much as fill icing typically is), so that it will expand to fill a little bit, but not too runny or it will just flatten out (leading to fat legged octopuses without as much dimension). Add a little water to thin, and practice on a spare cookie or parchment. Let them dry before you move on to the real ones, as it may take a few minutes for the icing to flatten. If the icing doesn’t merge together when you draw two lines next to each other, then thin it a bit and test again.
Now, here’s a picture of how to draw the octopus – it’s just 4 lines. The head is created when the lines merge together.
You can decorate the octos any way you want, but I’d suggest at least adding eyes. Here’s what I did.
Eyes: 2 large drops of white icing, topped with tiny dots of blue.
Spots: Random drops of blue
As you can see, they are all different, and not quite perfect, but that really added to the charm.
If you try this, I’d love to see!
You might also like…
I just realized I never posted the actual finished invitation, but the illustration for the invitation is here, along with instructions on doing a quick neat photoshop coloring job:
Real Life (TM) keeps interfering with all the blogging love I’d normally be sending your way this time of year, but I thought maybe you guys would like to see some of the new websites I’ve done lately… I really love website design – my techie geek side gets to play with my artsy side, so I’m very proud of these recent ones:
I finally got around to doing a little updating of the look and feel for the actual Dabbled Studios website. It was very in need of it! I still need to go in and update the content, but at least it’s prettier now! My favorite part of this is the full page resizing background (thanks, Grieg!). I used one of the methods at CSS-Tricks to get that like I wanted it. I’m also obsessed with @font-face now for embedding lovely fonts — for this one I used Raleway Thin from the most awesome League of Movable Type, and also Latin Modern (found at Font Squirrel which is a great place to find excellent free commercial use fonts)
EDIT: Doh, more work to to, just realized that IE continues to be a pain in my butt and the background doesn’t work right there. So look at it in Firefox or Chrome! EDIT 2: I think I fixed it! Let me know if you see any wonkyness in your browser.
See the site: Dabbled Studios.
This was a fun challenge — a simple, clean and inviting church website. I really like the fixed footer on this one, and the abundant white space. I can’t take all the credit for the look of this one, my friend Elise is apparently not only good at landscape design, but also a pretty fair hand at website design! This church is in my neighborhood, so it was also really nice to help out part of the community. See the site: Epworth at Candler Park
This is another fun one. The pub had a website, but it looked a little dated, and it was difficult to keep updated. So this new version is hip and modern, with an integrated blog making it easy for the owners to keep customers informed of events, happenings, and specials. See the site: The Hail Mary Sports Pub
Here is a fun little idea I came up with last year, a cute valentines (or anytime) gift for a little girl. A stacked felt heart or flower pin.
This was inspired by the fact that kids grow out of clothes so fast, and while I was going to make a shirt or dress with a heart applique, instead I decided to make this pin (and a few others) so they could be used for a longer time. This looks adorable pinned on a dress or jacket, and would even work pinned to a hair elastic for a cute hair accessory.
You just need:
Older kids can make these themselves, too!
Here are the instructions and a step by step photo tutorial!
These are fun and easy, and offer a ton of possibilities.. Check out these that Joanne at Ready, Set, Craft made last year
And here’s another version I made, a flower:
Already thinking about Valentine’s Day? Here’s last year’s popular vday card printable, Tentacles are for Hugging!
Snag the downloadable files here: http://dabbled.org/2010/01/tentacle-hugs-valentine-day-card-printable.html
And there’s also a quick tutorial there on how to make cute matching envelopes using scrapbook papers.
The best ideas are scribbled on a napkin, right? This little robot was drawn by The Boy at lunch this weekend. Cute, no? I think it’s pretty good for 5 1/2!
Loving these ideas for jewelry made from Legos from Colleen over at Some Art Talk. Go see the whole tutorial.
So much fun… and having a little boy, I had no idea legos came in such cute girly colors!
We’ve had school closed all week for snow. ALL WEEK! Even here in Atlanta that never happens (we close the schools for pretty much any level of snow, but it’s usually gone by the next day). So I’ve had husband (work was closed too) AND 5 year old home all week. Which means my usual calm work from home days were totally turned upside down. But we did have fun sledding and being lazy. Today we walked to Fernbank for some museum of natural history fun!
Now for punctuation: What the heck is this? You’re NOT supposed to use 2 spaces after the period at the end of the sentence? Who came up with that? I’ve always done it that way (I’m doing it that way right now, but of course, html will strip out the extra spaces, so you’ll never know.)
Seriously, do they not teach double spacing at the end of a sentence anymore?
I guess I should document some here for posterity, huh?
2 years ago my resolution was to do Illustration Friday every week, and I succeeded! And my art got better in the process.
Last year I worked on several big projects, like Foodwhirl.
This year?
ART:
Well, I think I want to start the Illustration Friday thing again. It really did force me to draw, and I’ve been such a slacker with the artwork lately. I’ve been focusing on web design, which I love (and is more easily lucrative!) but I’m afraid both my art and my blogging (here and at Foodwhirl) has suffered for that. So, I don’t think I’ll be able to make EVERY week, but I should at least make an attempt, right?
Illustration Friday from Sept 09
IF from Aug 09
IF from Nov 09
Did you know that I developed a new site look for Dabbled, and I’ve never implemented it? I think that should go on the list of things that need to happen this year–redesign of Dabbled. As well as porting my poor neglected art site (nancydorsner.com) over to WordPress, and integrating all these sites together under my own little media empire (insert maniacal cackling here).
So, that’s just two little things. And you can hold me to it!
I’m sure I should come up with a few more…
What about you? What are your goals? :)
Check out these DIY Monogram Mugs from Design Mom... what a great idea for a clever gift, or make a set for your family! I love the reuse of mismatched thriftstore mugs for this project.
This is one of the things I’ve linked to over the past month… here are a few more I’ve linked to on facebook and twitter that you might have missed, mostly Christmas related, but a few not:
