015-017 Hats, Colours, Haste

January 15: Shuriken Hat

On Friday nights I volunteer at a kid's program at my church. A little less than a month from now we will be having a Crazy Hat theme night. I plan on making a few crazy hats. Naturally, one of my first ideas was to fold a gigantic shuriken hat.


This 8-point shuriken is a modular design consisting of 8 pieces that connect into a ring. The ring can then be pushed together to form the throwing star. The transformation process does not work very well for this particular shuriken because it was made with thick poster paper (my arms were sore after folding all the pieces).

For a sense of scale, here is a photo of my sister wearing the "hat".



January 16: Colouring

A favourite childhood pastime - colouring. Be it cheap cartoony lineart in a book or a fresh white wall that mom just cleaned, kids like to paint the town red. Or blue. Or whatever crayons are available.

In Photoshop, I find it immensely relaxing to colour well-drawn greyscale images. It's actually rather easy - set a layer to "Colorize" and then have at it. Of course, one can do a bit more through various filters and masked adjustment layers.

From the beautiful comic "The Abominable Charles Christopher", by the amazing Karl Kerschl, comes this wonderful image. Below, I've desecrated his art with hideous colour. :)



January 17: Hasty Drawing
I was busy pretty much the entire day, so this is what I have to show for it. Hurrah?


The comment about my left hand is, of course, a reference to January 11.

008-010 Birds, birds, birds

So the last three days have followed a theme of sorts - Birds.

I'm working on something else, for which I need a bird. Some upcoming day I'll put more work into it and finish it off, at which point I'll post it for MSCE (it's not taboo to do something over multiple days, is it?). Because I was working on that project on January 8, I did not have much time left to do my actual MSCE for the day. And so...


Unfortunately, the origami bird is not suitable for my project. And that led to the Newspaper Bird of January 9:

The newspaper bird was made out of - you guessed it - newspaper. It's not even paper mache because I didn't use any sort of adhesive. I only used water. The beak is a pen tip and the legs are paper clips. Unfortunately, the newspaper bird won't work for the project either.

I have a new idea for the project which is not only much simpler but also a bit more clever. But that'll come up in the future.

MSCE for January 10 - we did a cooking contest thing at fellowship. The bird element - chicken.


We worked in teams. Honestly, my contributions were limited. I brought some canned cream of mushroom soup and opened said can. I helped mash potatoes (by hand, with a spoon). I watched over and flipped pieces of chicken as they cooked.

Surprisingly, our team won first place. The best cooking team did terrible at the first two challenges (food trivia and taste test) but our food was fine and we did ok in the earlier events. Woo!

My biggest contribution was (sadly) the naming of the dishes. The first dish is "The Eternal Question". It features chicken and egg. Get it? Yeah. I gave a bit of a speech to introduce it.

"When you sample this dish, you will have both a portion of chicken and a portion of the omelette. Close your eyes and select a piece at random. As you eat, ponder the age old question - what came first, the chicken or the egg (with bacon and cheese)?"

The second dish was named "Bounty of the Earth", derived from the French for potato "pomme de terre" (which literally translates to "apple of the earth"). It was so named because the centerpiece was a little mountain of mashed potatoes (very delicious!). We also had a vegetable medley and chicken with a creamy mushroom-spinach sauce. It was good.