Baking Art 1: Dragon Cake Fail

Dragon Cake

Material: Cake XD

Time: A day

Date: March 2018

I MADE A DRAGON CAKE (kinda)!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Full story below the timelapse video:

Sooooo where to even begin...

I have a list of life goals - not a physical list - just a list of things that I really want to do. Most of them are pretty crazy but none of them are particularly impossible. All most of them take is for me to turnaround and say "why haven't I done that yet?" and if there's no good reason then to grit down and DO IT! SO I MADE A DRAGON CAKE.

I remember I think it was back in high school that I came across this beautiful white dragon wedding cake from the butter end bakery and was absolutely in love. That was when I said: someday I'm going to make a dragon cake as beautiful as that and thus the life goal was born.

I've had a cake decorating kit for a long time but the problem is....... I've just never been that excited about decorating cakes/cookies/etc. My goal was always to make something delicious and to spend most of my time baking so after making a cake for example even if I'd planned on decorating I'd typically just.... not because I never really saw very much worth in spending a bunch of time decorating something when frosting was my least favorite part of cake anyways..... But at the same time I love seeing beautifully decorated cakes/cookies and now that I have a bit more time and a bit more space I think I'm going to dive into decorating a bit more especially since my dragon cake was a bit of a fail so I definitely need to improve!

Anyways... even though I had no special event to make a cake for I finally just went for it! and I'm glad I did because now I know both that 1) I can do it and 2) I still have a little ways to go until I can make a cake I'd be proud enough of to serve to a party.

Anyways I talk a lot about the many failures of my dragon cake in the video but the main things were that it started falling apart and also I wasn't happy with how the scales/face/actual dragon details looked. But overall I'm super happy that I did this and proud of what I've created with extremely little planning and extremely little prior cake decorating experience!

And now - of course - pictures!

My original design:

More pics of the cake:

Digital Art 2: Sheep Castle

Sheep Castle

Medium: Digital

Time: A Month

Date: January 2018

So here's the second digital art picture I did right after the previous sheepdog one! [Which as you may notice they have pretty similar subject matter XD ]

Full timelapse video below and more details underneath!:

So - wow - this work really was something. Summary: I wanted to force myself to draw pretty much all of things I was afraid of drawing digitally: grass, rocks, rocks, more grass, and more rocks.

This drawing took literally forever but I was determined to finish it. Once I finished the castle I started getting super excited because it was finally looking decent but before that it was a bit of a drag to force myself to keep working on it. But hey - I did it! I finished it and I love it. I mean I wish it had a little bit more of a magical/stylistic element to it but overall I'm super proud of it... but I also don't plan on doing another digital picture like this any time soon - they're exhausting.

In general I relied on the techniques I knew from painting and tried to translate them to digital mainly because I have actually painted grass before and it came out okay; and rocks and they came out okay... but I feel like digital really leaves you with no wiggle room! Real materials naturally already have a bit of organic detail to them and I never realized how much I used that as a crutch. Digital painting is HARD. And I didn't even end up doing anything realistic.

So basically I still have a long way to go but I'm really proud of both the final product and the fact that I stuck with it and finished.

I was particularly happy with how the castle and the clouds turned out. The grass I didn't like very much but at the same time I didn't really mind it. The sheep and sheepdog were cute but I probably could've made them a little more realistic but that's okay. And that cliff in the front... let's just not even mention that.... as well as the wall - though I'm relatively happy with how it ended up turning out I think I discovered how not to digitally paint a wall rather than how to.

Anyways the video is kinda long so I rambled enough in that already ;)

My next post will likely be about the crazy thing I baked today so look forward to that ;)

Thanks!