Promptapalooza

 Over the last two days I’ve been digging into the reaches of my mind and pulling out very short summaries for very short stories.

 Why did I do this? Because I’m writing a book, and I’m actually doing it instead of what I’ve done before, which is to start a novel and then lose confidence twenty thousand words in. No, this is going to be short and sweet and prove to me that I can actually write and publish a book.

 My plan for this is to write a hundred one hundred word stories, and that always looks weird when I write it out. So in order to make my task simpler I initially came up with twenty themes for my stories, five stories per theme adds up to one hundred stories. Seems simple.

 However, my initial pace of work was something like three stories per day, and puts a long estimated publishing date on a book that barely peeks over ten thousand words long.

 So I’ve taken a leaf from my friend Kelly’s book (yes, that Kelly) and created a list of prompts for myself. Now Kelly is a big figure in a couple of fan communities, so she can just put out the call for prompts and they come flooding in.

 Me though, I’m not a big figure in fandom, I barely even exist there to be honest, so I have to come up with these things myself.

 Doing ninety three in two days, most of which were done yesterday, was quite a challenge, but definitely worth the time and effort. I ended up being inspired by a whole bunch of things, by TV programs, Greek myths, fairy tales, the bible, it’s a real hodge podge of  stories, but I like that variety. With such a broad scope for topics, this book will show my full range.

 Since the hardest part of the process was coming up with something to write about, this should up my rate of writing to the point where I’ll get this finished and ready to publish by the end of the month.

 It might be a good idea to always have a list of prompts hanging around for when you might be suffering from writer's block, because even if you're struggling with a novel, you can always quickly produce some flash fiction to keep yourself in practice.

 There are lots of lists of prompts on the internet, it's just a case of looking for them. If you're lazy, though, the LiveJournal group 100-themes has a list of prompts that covers a whole bunch of topics and would make a good starting point for the newbie prompt-challenger.

 Of course, officially joining the challenge and using fandoms for it is entirely up to you.

 Current story count: 8/100

Apologies and 'notes' for new piece.

 Sorry for being so inactive lately, I've been sleepy a lot lately. But now I'm battling to get back into the game!

 Also, there's an art contest and the piece I'm working on for it.

 The contest is the dA "Color-me-club" January line art contest. This month's theme is Sci-fi/dancing.

 It's supposed to be a choice between the two, but I decided to combine the two themes together for fun.

 I decided on a retro-futuristic set of space travellers in an almost 'Wallace and Gromit' style space ship. So helmets, skin tight jumpsuits, if I ever colour this, a lot of orange. I'm hoping they look a-ethnic, so can be coloured as different ethnicities depending on what the colourist wants. I also wanted a nomad from the harsh cold mountains, and during the second pass, I decided to have her look South East Asian/Mongolian. Kind of happened by accident, but I liked it so I'm keeping it. She's going to be wearing furs, skins and knitted clothes for a challenging mix of textures. Also, because if I lived in the tundra, that's what I'd be wearing.

 I also decided to give her a mammoth. Because its science fiction and I can.

 Also, I wish we still had mammoths.

 I've knocked up a series of notes over the last couple of days to plot the composition and details, as I like to know what I'm drawing in a piece like this before I start.

 Here are my initial drawings:

First pass

Second pass

  This is where I decide where I want what where on a two dimensional view.

 After using Colors! 3D (I'll have a review up after I've got more pictures to show), I've been influenced to see a picture as a series of planes, or 2D images in front of each other.

 So this prompted a sketch of each plane and what I wanted in it.

Various planes and their contents

 As well as planning the composition like this, I also concentrated on details. The most important being the dancing couple in the fore ground. So I designed the women's faces and sketched out some thumbs and passes on their poses.

The Ladieeeez

 I think if I copy any of these poses, it'll come across as stiff, so I'm planning to play it loose and more or less wing their positions.

 I also sketched out some of the background details, like a robot radio, the mammoth, the space-woman's fellow crew members, the rocket and an instrument.

Background details

 So far, so good.

 I'm already to get going on this. I'm going to start today on A3 bristol board, so wish me luck and hope the drawing goes well!

Better homity pie under Churchill... (plus progress)

 As you can probably tell from my paraphrasing of a World War II propaganda poster, homity pie is a relic of World War II.

 It was originally comprised of potatoes, onions and leeks, but was probably often made with whatever the Land Girls could find.

 We follow this tradition to this day, and I'm going to outline the basics of what you need to make a homity pie so that you guys can try this leftovers magnet for yourselves.

 The basics are:

 A pastry case (you can make your own, or buy one pre-made. If you bake it yourself, make sure to blind bake it)
 Potatoes to fit in the case (floury or sticky work best. New potatoes are not your friend)
 Onions
 Lots of cheese (any cheese you want. Mum's friend Jayne uses mature cheddar. Mum uses a variety of the stuff that's in our fridge. We really like cheese. Mmm, cheese)

 You'll want to cook the potatoes first, in my family, we boil them so that they're soft and mix up well. There's no reason that mashed potatoes can't also work, but I wouldn't recommend using smash or similar, it'll probably be too insubstantial.

 Let them cool a bit as you chop and fry the onions. You'll want these translucent as opposed to caramelised, as they'll cook more in the pie itself. You can cook up some garlic too, which is what we do.

 Once that's done, you mix the potatoes and onions with plenty of cheese. It's better to have too much cheese than too little in this case, as it sticks the potatoes and onions together. You can add double cream and/or beaten egg at this stage, if you like to help it stick better.

 Now you put it in the pastry case and cook in a pre-heated oven at gas mark 4/5 for about 20-30 minutes, or until golden brown. We put sliced tomatoes on before baking, because Mum likes tomatoes.

 It won't look appetising at this stage, but trust me, once it's golden brown, it's a welcome sight.

 Here are some other things you can put in too:

 Double Cream
 Egg(s)
 Courgettes
 Bacon
 Mushrooms
 Pepper
 Tomato slices on top

 You may be able to substitute the potatoes for another root vegetable. Go wild, the sky is the comfort food limit.

 However, if you want a proper recipe to try first, there's a good one in the Crank's Bible by Nadine Abensur. It's full of vegetarian recipes, and fellow carnivores, there's no reason that they have to stay veggie, so give it a shot!

 So now my brief foray into food blogging is over, here's today's progress!

 I decided to try and add a shimmer to the pink using gold ink, but I'm sceptical of how well it worked. However, I like the mix of pinks I got in the process, so I'm happy.

 I also used impasto gel to add texture to the white figure, and I think it looks pretty good. Tomorrow I'll do the same with the black figure so that the white one looks less odd. I'm also planning to add gloss varnish, but I'm yet to decide whether to varnish the whole painting or just a section like I did on Cleopatra Skies.

 That decision will wait until after the black section is finished tomorrow.

Black, Pink and White

 I've been a lazy artist today, opting to instead play Pokemon White instead of painting during the day. So today we have kinda crappy night time pictures.

 Yay!

 I scanned the initial sketch in first and edited it to make sure it would fit on the canvas and look the way I wanted it to.

 Then I transferred it onto the canvas using graphite transfer paper and adjusted a few things, like where the curves and zigzags went and how curved the black face's nose was. My sister pointed out the day before yesterday that it looked pretty straight, which was not what I was going for.

 As you can see, it's much better here.

 After that, I started painting, rosy pink in the middle, and a first layer of soft body black and white paint on the faces.

So far, so decent, but I'm planning to do something more with that pink, as I find it a bit too bland at the moment.

 Again, the paint goes onto the sides, so that a frame will not be necessary. The paint on the edges follows on from the front in what I hope is a nice design feature :)

 More on this picture tomorrow.

 Also, my mum's making homity pie, so I'm planning to take pictures of what I do to help with that as well as the final product, because I love homity pie.