Bits from our trip

Eloine

We had an eventful trip overnight to Yosemite yesterday and here are a few photos. One of the things that was interesting was to harvest some wild elderberries. I have been looking for them because it’s been said that my little king bird likes them in their diet. I like elderberry jelly as well so here they were all ripe and ready for the eating! Or at least so I thought! A word of warning… cook the berries first and only have a few and DO NOT eat any of the stems. My mother and I both did and suffered from mild cyanide poisoning 🙁

Wild Elderberry

Garden social networking!

Eloine

grow the planetA friend of mine told me about a new social networking site that I had to check out. It seems to be pretty new and still in beta mode but has an interesting concept behind it. Trading produce with neighbors is an ancient tradition but this site leverage new technology to make it easier in this advanced society. By creating a profile on growtheplanet.com it will connect you up with other people in your area. It even has growing tips and ways to plan your own garden with a growing journal where it tells you how many sedds to plant, when to water and fertilize etc. Much like the widely popular farmville but with real veggies! In depth review from tech crunch here.

I had a little trouble creating an account using Safari on a Mac and there doesn’t appear to be a way to search friends already in the system that I can see yet. It seems to have started in Italy so there are a few things still in Italian that I had to figure out but I am excited about it’s promise and I hope that it develops. Hope others in my area join soon!

 

Keeping fresh basil at hand

Eloine

Alternative to cut flowers

Purple leaf basil

I recently learned a great way to keep fresh basil at your fingertips. I’ve tried growing it in the house with an aerogarden and found that to be too expensive and produced very little – not to mention the fact it’s just plain noisy. I tried the window sill but not enough light in our kitchen. In the garden it grows well but when cooking you don’t want to walk all the way out there just to get a few leaves to garnish a dish. In the refrigerator it tends to wilt and the store bought hydroponic version just tend to get slimy after just a while because it was stored in cold storage at the grocery store. By accident I learned while trimming back the basil in my garden because it started to flower that you should keep those trimmings even if you aren’t going to use them right away.

Basil gets bushier and fuller when trimmed. I enjoy the flowers so I thought that I would save them and have a nice little vase of cut basil flowers that smell nice too. I set it next to a diffused window thinking they would wilt and die in several days like cut flowers from the garden do and low and behold they never did. They actually developed roots and continued to grow some leaves that I could harvest right there.  A few of them sprouted quite a root system that I eventually just planted them back in the ground and I had another basil plant!

air dry
air dry

Next time I have scrambled eggs I can have fresh cut basil mixed in. The picture here is a  variety called purple leaf basil that taste just as good as the Italian Basil in my opinion and yet is a nice ornament in the kitchen. Italian basil will work just as well with this method.

Eventually the weather will get too cold and I won’t be able to have fresh cut basil but this method helps to extend the life that way. Be sure and keep some for drying though since they work great when re-hydrated and thrown into soups or just as an aside to a dish. You can group them in a bunch on the stem and hang them upside down to dry. This works well especially if you directed a fan at it.

I like dry mine by to laying it out on a tray made of screen and put it in front of a fan. Here is a link of the device I like to use. You can easily make one yourself but this one is all nice and contained. I recently learned that you can also freeze basil in a ziplock back. Apparently you can have greens all year round that way. I haven’t tried that one yet but that is next on my list of things to do!

How to draw a cute ladybug in Photoshop

How to draw a cute ladybug in Photoshop

Eloine

 

Step by step

LadybugWhen drawing from scratch I usually  draw my little cartoons with a combination of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop but I decided to not stick with what was familiar to me and try to do the whole drawing in just photoshop. I used mostly used shape layers tracing a drawing that I sketched out on paper. I will show you below the steps from inspiration to completion on how to create this bug on the right. Hopefully you can take these steps and create your own cute little creature using these techniques.

Sketching the idea

Step 1

I still have trouble drawing on screen. There is nothing wrong with it if you can do it but I like to rough out an idea on paper and then scan or take a photo of the basic idea using that as a reference.

Use elipse tool to draw the body

Step 2

After you have imported the image select the Ellipse tool or press the U key and make a circle for the body. This will be the most bottom layer above the layer that is being traced.

Use anchors to pull the shape out

Step 3

Not that this is not a scientific drawing but a lady bug body isn’t perfectly round so to give it some identity I used my Direct Selection Tool (A) to click the path of the circle and this revealed the anchor point with the various handle bars. I could then stretch them to reshape the bottom of the bug.

In addition I clicked on layers style icon at the bottom of the layers palette to bring up the gradient overlay. I thought a dark brown to black radial blend would give it an illusion of depth by giving it a slight shadow under the area where the wings will be.

Use the pen took to create a shape layer

Step 4

Next I selected the pen tool and made sure that a new shape layer was selected versus the paths. Then I traced the outline of the drawing for the first wing noting that one wing would overlap the other. After creating the initial curves I can then click on each anchor point and adjust the curve by rotating the control bars associated with the anchor points as mentioned in step three.

click on layer effect to add both inner and outer shadow

Step 5

I can now apply a layer FX by selecting a slight inner shadow where the wing curves and a drop shadow where the wing rests on the body.

Make one wing overlap the other

Step 6

Draw the second wing the same as above and then position it underneath the left wing so that one shadow appears to overlap the other.

Make each shape and group them together

Step 7

I traced the shape of one foot with the pen tool and then duplicated and stretched each foot by hitting the transform tool to match the drawing. This will make 6 duplicate layers so it’s best to group them all in one folder called foot by clicking the folder icon at the bottom of the layers pallet.

Use the pen tool to create the legs

Step 8

I created each angle of the leg by using the line tool in the shape block of the tool box. I could have joined each segment into one but I like to keep each section editable. Again I grouped these layers together as well.

Use elipse too to create the head and add a gradient overlay for the face shine

Step 9

Using the ellipse too I matched the head shape and put it on the layer below the wing. I added a gray to black gradient overlay to the face so the smile would show and add a suggestion that light is coming up from the white ground below.

Draw a circle filled with gray for the eye shadow depth and stroke it

Step 10

Make a circle for the eye and fill with gray and a stroke of black. This will be the outer part of the eye.

Add two more elipse shapes with no stroke, one white and one black

Step 11

Add a white circle slightly smaller and move it up so the outline is thicker on the bottom than on the top.

Add a small dot for the pupil.

Add the right eye and change the layer stack order. Draw a custom shape for the mouth.

Step 12

Duplicate layer with the outlined eye and shrink (transform) it a little to make it look like it’s further away and move the layer order to below the head.

 

Combonation of the shape layer and layer mask to create a group of dots.

Step 13

Add more circles for the dots on the bug with the elipse tool.

For the dot that goes over the right edge I made a selection of the right wing and inverted the selection. Then applied it as a layer mask to visually cut off the edge of the dot. It’s still there if you get rid of the layer mask but hidden from view.

A little highlight and curly antenna and we are almost done!

Step 14

Lastly a little shine suggestion with a shape of white at 50% transparency on top layer.

The curly antenna was drawn with the pen tool as a path and then stroked as a path.

Lastly I decided this would be a cute little accent for my RSS feeds as my follow me bug. I used the custom speech bubble shape and smooshed it around with the direct selection tool. The font I used is an old one called giddyup std. I liked how it matched her little antenna!

 

A fresh find at the farmers market – chayote leaves!

Eloine

I had to go to Kaiser Thursday for a followup appointment and was happy to discover that that the local farmers market was taking place in the courtyard and very busy with packed tables of produce and customers. I thought it bit strange that the farmers market would be at the hospital but when I think about the Kaiser slogan of eat well, live well and thrive it started to make sense.

They had the usual heirloom tomatoes and seedless grapes that are in season now but there was one grower that had a few things I’ve never had a chance to try before. What I didn’t know about was chayote leaves. He told me they are the leaves from the chayote squash that can grow out of control. He said you usually stir fry them. Intrigued since it didn’t look like something you usually eat I had to try it. I brought it home and asked my mom if she could think of something to do with it. Sure enough she did. She fried it in a pan and then mixed it with a dish of brown and wild rice mixture she had along with some chared corn from Trader Joes and some basil. It was scrumptious!

The taste of the chayote leaves cooked this way has the flavor similar to an artichoke. It is a little fuzzy but nothing like raddish leaves so it’s fine when mixed in the dish. What I was surprised by was the nice flavor and healthy too as most greens seem to be!