Thursday, September 27, 2012

Happy cakes

One of my favourite 'recovery' activities, activities I have when I feel I need to take it slow for a day, would be baking. And since I really needed to take it slow after the 'Noche de Tuna' this weekend, I started baking some mini chocolate cakes. With extra chocolate on top. And sprinkles. I love sprinkles. They make me happy.

The recipe:
Mix 100 g butter
with 100 g sugar.
Add 2 eggs and mix everything.
Mix 100 g of flower
and 2 teaspoons of cocoa powder through, don't mix for too long.

Pour into muffin tins or papers, bake in an oven at 170 degrees Celsius until done (you can check this with a knitting needle or something like that: when it comes out clean, the cake is done). When they had cooled off, I dipped the cakes in molten chocolate and then in chocolate sprinkles. And voila!

Oh yeah, and as promised: pics of my second batch of designs and my business cards!

This item is called 'Day & Night'. An egg cup at day and a candlestick at night if you turn it upside down. Not yet for sale, because I managed to send in the wrong file for my second batch, which was a version that wasn't exactly round.
Whoops... I sent the right file with the third batch, so hopefully that one will turn out right. And the 'wrong' egg cup/candlestick can still be used in the product pictures, to show both functions (egg cup and candlestick) in the same picture without having to resort to Photoshop.

This ring is called Sydney. I make it a habit of giving my jewelry designs names that are personal names, and at the same time have a connection (sometimes somewhat cryptic) about how the design looks or what it is based on. Can you guess the link between this design and it's name? I ordered it in stainless steel for my third batch, but since it doesn't meet the design requirements 100% I just hope it'll turn out all right!
I also made a little ceramic cake-mold of my logo. It's not for sale and I'm not going to use it just yet, but I plan to make some cakes with it later on this year, just for fun.

And here, they are, my business cards. Whaddayathink?

And the last pictures of this week: the tomato soup I ate for lunch. I don't like store-bought tomato soup, it tastes too artificial. But making it yourself is actually pretty easy. It can be much healthier as well, since you can add plenty of veggies. I played around a bit with Photoshop (well, the open source alternative GIMP) to create the absolutely white background. A bit difficult because some settings also made the bowl dissappear, since it was almost white as well. I ended up altering some parts manually. These are the results:

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Third batch of items: check check double check!

And I'm almost done with my collection for this year! It is going really fast now.
This batch of designed products consisted of pendants and one business card holder, making the total count of finished items (assuming they will all come out the way I planned) at 11 jewelry designs and 2 product designs. That means I've already hit my target collection for this year, which was 10 to 12 jewelry designs. Ánd I still have time to design maybe one or two extra items in my fourth and final batch this year. Whoohoo!

Aaaaaand... my business cards arrived! I designed them myself and am quite happy with the result, especially because I'm not that big on graphic design. Meaning I usually hate designing graphic things, and that I'm just no good at it. But the cards came out nicely so I'm really glad. Like the pics of my second batch of designs, I'll post a picture of them soon, I promise ;).

These days I've been grossly neglecting my challenges, because I was just too busy with my product designs. They were already late and I had to order them before the weekend, or my whole year schedule would fall apart. I want to order a fourth batch right after I've received the third batch, but the fourth batch has to arrive at least a month before the holiday season, so, considering that it takes 3 to 4 weeks before an ordered batch arrives, my schedule is quite tight.

But I made up a bit of the neglect by going to a falconry show at Falconcrest and shooting some niiiiice pics. Not that it was difficult with that kind of models. Those birds are so beautiful!


I also loved the interaction between the birds and the falconers.

It's too bad the birds were moving too fast for me to capture them mid-flight. I'm not that good a photographer yet, trying to take pics of their flight resulted in these kind of pictures.

See the white blur? Yes, that's a bird :p. Speedsters, I tell you.

This weekend, there has been a small-scale Tuna festival, Noche de Tuna (not "tuna" as in fish, but "Tuna" as in Spanish student troubadour music group) in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Several groups were here from Spain and Mexico, together with the Eindhoven groups (one male and one female group). Since I'm in the female group, La Tuniña, of course I participated as well, and right now I'm still recovering from fatigue. It was a lot of fun, and there will be another 'Noche de Tuna' next year. But now, back to work!

Friday, September 14, 2012

Challenging challenges

Still no dice on the product photos of batch no. 2 (I'm still utterly without inspiration), but my various 'challenges' are wielding some results. Disclaimer: with results, I mean actual results and not high-quality ones. No need to get your hopes up, it's all about learning here ;).

Challenge no. 1, '14 days 1 shape a day', is finished. It's been really good for my 3D modelling skills: when working on my product designs I usually don't feel like experimenting with the software, because things are progressing slow enough as it is. However, when just tinkering around for the challenge I can experiment to my heart's content, with improved skills as a result. The shapes that came out of this challenge are:

Not that bad, eh? I might actually use some of the shapes and techniques for future product or jewelry designs.

After this challenge I started a new one to learn creating designs with a sleek, futuristic look. '14 days 1 futuristic, sleek design a day'. I naturally lean more towards organic styles and have trouble making an item come across as sleek and high-tech. I'm trying to use several mediums for this: 3D modelling, but also sketching and marker drawings or even Photoshop and/or Illustrator (well, the free & open source alternatives GIMP and Inkscape for me).

It started out giving me quite a headache but after studying many reference pictures it's going better. But anyway, stepping out of my comfort zone is what these challenges are all about, so it is all good, I guess.

As you can see in the lower right picture, I managed to find the virtual 'camera' in the program back, with help from J. . Now I just have to learn how to make decent renderings...

Another challenge, photography with backgrounds & props, is still running. I find it rather difficult but it's a good exercise trying to come up with new props and compositions. The newest photographs:

I scrapped some pictures from a supermarket magazine with the theme 'la bella Italia' and taped them into my sketchbook. It is always nice to have some reference/inspiration pictures by hand. I love the colours of the pictures. Oh, and the pasta canister is a new purchase I came across and just hád to take home. I love canisters in various styles, they feel so homely ;). It is the perfect size and style for storing my embroidery materials, which until now were residing in a plastic zip bag.

These are the study sketches to understand how exactly 'futuristic' looks like. I find that studying those pictures by observing is one thing, but sketching them makes you understand the form language a lot better.

Well, that's it for now! In a few weeks, I'll have the bulk of my product design work for this year done, so I'll hopefully have a bit more time for creations in the kitchen and sewing field. Around that time I'll be busy with promoting and marketing so I will be needing the creative diversion...

Thursday, September 6, 2012

I love this!

Hi there, long time no see! I'd like to ask how you're doing, but since I doubt I'd get a response I'll just start talking on my own again ;). Once again about my design work, since that is basically all I'm doing at the moment. A little boring to the naked eye, but all the more interesting for me ;). I love creating! Love it!

It is a relief to be able to say that, after working on my designs for, well, forever it seems. It's just several months though in real time though. Since about March I started to work on them 'for real', dedicating several days a week to learning the 3D software, brainstorming, more brainstorming, sketching, and trying my hands at creating models for 3D printing. My whole business plan is based on that, you see. Creating actual, physical, usable products to be 3D printed, instead of just the ones in my head. Sellable products instead of imaginary ones. To earn a bit of extra income in the future that would allow me to spend more time on designing. And so on, until I would be able to work on my own products full time, making the transition to mass produced items.

All this time, a thought, hastily pushed away, kept creeping up. What if this turned out to not be what I loved? What if creating physical products on my own was not what kept my heart beating and my blood flowing? Then what?

For years, I've known that I wanted to work independently as a product designer, and later on in my own design studio. It would take a lot of work and would be a mighty difficult road, I've always known, but I felt that it was just as well the only scenario that I really really wanted.

And now, with my first batch of personally designed products in the shop, my second batch of products arrived just today, and my third batch almost finished (hopefully next week), I think it is safe. Safe to say: I love this! Such a relief ;). Because loving what you do is so incredibly important, especially when planning to walk the difficult road. So yeah, I frickin' love this! Whew!

I'm even considering starting a two-year Master course Industrial Design at Delft University (two hour away from my home to boot), because I'm starting to doubt my current (Bachelor) level of knowledge and skill will be enough to deal with mass-production and more complex commercial designs. Yeah, me, who used to say: "never again" after finishing my Bachelor's. That's how much I love this, and how confident I've become about this suiting me. It would require a rather insane schedule since I would want to continue what I'm doing now as well, and I would still need to brush up my skills and knowledge on several fields since it is another University, where the Bachelor education has a different focus than the one I did. But I would start it only after a year anyway, so I'll have some time for that.

Okay, I'll stop ranting now...


Basically everything else I did apart from work lately were exercises and challenges to improve my skills on several fields. Yes, I'm obsessed, I know ;).

I'm nearing the end of my "14 days, 1 shape a day" challenge. It was to train my 3D software modelling skills. Just using taking 15 to 60 minutes a day to create an aesthetically pleasing shape. Creating a good render (virtually created image) of it was originally part of the challenge because it seemed a good opportunity to learn that as well, but I've mysteriously managed to make my virtual camera disappear and have yet to find it back.

For non-3D-software-experts: the camera is an object in the 3D model from which point the virtual item would be 'photographed', but no camera means no point to photograph from and thus no digital image. There you see kids, always remember where you leave your stuff! (Yes, that was a lame joke, sorry for that).

These are the results of day 1 to 4, in screenshots, still awaiting the missing camera.

I also figured learning to create interesting product pictures would be convenient. And fun. So I'm trying to create more interesting settings when photographing by adding props etc. Haven't gotten very far though. The score so far (including the picture on top of this post):

I've gotten a bit farther with my embroidery.

A quick drawing I made while half asleep, it turned out better than expected. I should try that more often, drawing without thinking about everything. Less thinking about doing, more doing. It's just like life, really.

And another drawing. Sigh, drawing fabric is hard...

I'll post the pictures of my second batch of products soon!