I had grown carrots last year, but I’m never shy about growing them again. This year’s harvest of baby finger carrots is a small one so far, but I’m going to sow heaps more in three or four pots to keep producing throughout the rest of spring and summer. This year, we’re doing potatoes (three…
Eye fillet steak pies with a puff pastry top and buttery potato mash. The base recipe is here. I modified the recipe quite a bit: I cubed beef-eye fillets instead of using mince (or ground beef, as Americans would say). This creates delicious chunks of tender beef that cook in roughly the same time as…
Hobbits aren’t the only ones who get to enjoy New Zealand’s amazing landscapes. In October, we took up lodging in Ahipara, about 4 hours northwest of Auckland, in the remote Northland. Ahipara is a surfing destination, a bit boring, but it’s a great base for exploring far more interesting and beautiful places up thataway.
This is the 10th anniversary of my life as a sometimes blogger. 2002 was a very interesting year. Post 9/11, pre-Bush wars. We were a couple of years on the tail of the internet bust. Work for me was slim. I was often broke and designing web sites for crappy garage bands who wanted to…
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been on a seed-sowing frenzy. Last year – my first full-on foray into vegetable and flower gardening – was a great boot camp. This year, after more research and guidance from Jedi Masters, I’ve taken a far more aggressive approach. No tentative Andrew this year. It’s all about…
Ta-da! Melody moved everything to the computer. This is the final rendering. I couldn’t have asked for a more professional and beautiful execution of a whimsical idea. Jeremy is very happy and has already used this as a watermark on stationery. Next up? T-shirts and lord knows what else.
Melody refined the candidate sketches and produced this one. Its strengths are the strong statuesque lighting, the correspondence of the diagonal shadow lines with the general thrust of the centaur’s firing line, and the abstract anatomical connection between the centaur and the bicycle wheels. There’s also a sense of motion and 3D depth that I’m…
After the initial concepts, Melody produced 8 versions of the selected sketch to gauge my reaction to stylistic options. I had already been impressed with the spirit of her sketches, and narrowed this group down to three candidates.
My boo Jeremy has for a long time expressed an interest in having a t-shirt with a logo on it that combines a bicycle and a centaur. As a birthday gift to him, I hired a local graphic artist I met through work and asked her to take on the project. After a bit of…
Two ways with squid.