Making pasta more interesting
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Back in January one of my new years resolutions was to eat more healthily. I've been improving slowly, but one of the main problems was that I'd make something unhealthy or just eat snack foods for lunch. Wanting something thats quick and easy but still tastes nice often saw me gravitating towards crisps and chocolate - hardly the healthy alternative.
I'm quite keen on pasta, but usually as an accompaniment to something else as it tends to be quite boring in its own. I was experimenting in the kitchen and managed to come up with something that makes it a much more appetising main dish. Drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with plenty of mixed herbs and black pepper, it tastes fantastic - served with a salad, its a great healthy meal that only takes about ten minutes to prepare - just what I was after!
Posted at 14:50
Pixel art tower
Thursday, July 15, 2004
Over on the enScape forums a thread was started with the concept that anyone who wants to participate can draw a section of a tower using pixelart, which will all be combined into a large tower when completed.
I decided to work on the base for the tower, but it was taking ages, so the effort sort of trailed off towards the end - I had planned to make the top floor more interesting and add extra people and cars.
Pixel art is quite a distinctive illustration style, often giving quite a retro appearance like old computer game graphics.
Its rather laborious drawing pixel by pixel, fortunately with modern design tools the process can be sped up, but it still boils down to drawing pixel by pixel for the most part. Its relatively easy to draw the basic shapes, but its a lot trickier to work out draw in the shading to make the objects look more realistically 3D. You can probably tell which bits I did at the beginning and which I got to later on as I get better by how good the shading is.
I don't think it's too shabby for a first try - maybe I'll play with it some more when I feel like doing so, I could probably create some nice icons/buttons for the site.
Posted at 23:43
The Blue Room
Sunday, July 11, 2004
I'm not referring to the elliptical blue room in The White House (perhaps they had to keep the names simple to help Bush find his way about.) Rather the fact that I finally got around to redecorating my bedroom at home.
I don't have any particular liking of blue, or any other colour for that matter, but I bought 'China Blue' paint for the walls and a dark blue carpet seemingly matched it best, so thats what I ended up with. It certainly ended up a little more blue than I had expected, but it works well enough.
I hadn't laid my own carpet before this, but I think I made a reasonable job of it, despite gripper rod scars and carpet burns aplenty. I need to make some new shelves after throwing away my hi-fi unit, but I've come up with a little design for a floating corner shelf that I'll probably write up at a later date.
I hadn't realised quite how long it had been since the last update - I guess I just got carried away with various things. Hopefully I can update a little more regularly from now on as my work constraints become a little easier. Who knows, maybe I'll even finish the site off one day...
Posted at 18:17
