ragingyoghurt

Category Archives: werk

“comic artist rehab is where four comic artists (who haven’t been as busy as they should) commit to drawing four panels every four days for four weeks.”

this month, i am one of those artists — and today is my first strip! come for a squiz if you’re interested or if you’d like to arrange for an intervention for someone you know.

my friend, amber, set this up, and clearly she is plenty busy as it is, because she is also the one responsible for the kids craft weekly website, and now book, which i spent a chunk of last month working on, and which is finally back from the printer, with its satiny smooth cover that i can’t stop stroking (and now i know how matt moran felt at that good food show demonstration). you know you want one!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 2 November 2007 at 9:56 pm

permalink | filed under drawn, werk

i really put my eyes through the wringer over the weekend: one feels quite swollen, and the other is decidedly twitchy. there’s nothing like a looming deadline (which i’d cleverly been choosing to ignore, until it was too late to pretend it wasn’t looming) to keep me at the computer for all hours of the day, beyond blog and facebook.

[ nellicent! join! ]

i’ve been drawing on my real desktop, and shuffling little coloured boxes around my virtual one, and i have within easy reach too many chocolate bars and not quite enough bowls of berries. cups of tea are always on standby.

i’ve been drawing happy pots and perturbed sheep, know-it-all kitchen sponge people — the best enforced fun i’ve had in a long time. i’m helping to put together a real, live book for the real fun website, kids craft weekly, and at the moment we are pretending that it will all be done and sent out into the world in the next month.

HAHAHA.

i’ve just realised we must look exactly like this amiable saucepan, smiling blankly in the face of adversity.

anyway. buy a book? gaarn. you never know when you might want to turn your collection of wooden spoons into a family of puppets. or a paper bag into an owl.

[ photographs © kids craft weekly ]

posted by ragingyoghurt on 24 September 2007 at 6:01 pm

permalink | filed under drawn, snacks, werk

my desk is a mess again, and i haven’t even arrived at the busy time. i am circling the periphery, looking in, pacing myself. just pacing.

at my elbow i have sheets of paper, covered in scribbled lists: lists of amendments to layouts; lists of drawings to make; lists of invoices to send; lists of where to go in queensland.

i have passes to a film on the weekend: “an epic tale of mothers and sons, mothers and daughters, unrequited love, betrayal and secrets… the true story of a glamorous shanghai nightclub singer, who struggles to survive in seventies australia with two young children“. phew!

i have tea: muji jasmin tea ball in a muji glass teapot, good gifts from my good mother.

i have chocolate: a monsieur truffe bar with cocoa solids of 64%. there is some guff on the back of the package about fresh fruity notes and bouquets of dried fruits, but i am simply impressed by how a dark chocolate bar — french, no less (by way of melbourne) — can be so goshdarned creamy.

i have an urgent calling to watch that hideous show, “age of love“.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 August 2007 at 10:30 pm

permalink | filed under chocolate, misc, tv, werk

the first thing counterboy said to me as i stepped into zumbo this morning was, “why haven’t you been blogging?”. to which i might have mumbled something about being busy. i dunno.

i don’t remember so much of last week. i know there was a crazy deadline that had lurched and hiccupped over the weekend, and then into the week itself, where corrections and adjustments were still being made an hour before it was due wherever it was going. and then a large bunch of flowers showed up on my doorstep the following evening. and then, um…

i met my aunt for a devonshire tea in a foodhall in chatswood, where the scones were warmed in the microwave before being plonked on a plate with two little squirts of cream-in-a-can and two tiny foil-sealed packs of kraft strawberry jam. that’ll learn us to get scones at a muffin place, although really, the scones were the best thing on the tray. she paid for morning tea, as she is wont to, and then she paid for dimsum as well. and right at the end, she handed me a box of home-made yam cake. good value, my aunt.

i met a friend (really, my sister’s friend) for brunch in newtown, and although i couldn’t persuade her to have tacos at 10am (plus, they weren’t actually open yet), we didn’t do too badly at the cafe across from the cinema, with buckwheat pancakes, coconut-infused mascarpone, maple syrup, and half the fruit in a small greengrocer. oh, and a side of bacon. she is from singapore; we spoke singlish. it was great.

i became addicted to the pre-packed exotic mushrooms at harris farm. shiitake, enoki, shimeji, and oyster mushrooms, quickly sauteed in sesame oil with rather a lot of chopped garlic and whatever asian greens are handy, poured over jasmin rice — what a dinner it made… twice! i had it first with flowering choi sum one night, and then addressed my addiction head on by buying more mushrooms to have with broccoli and baby buk choy soon after). you don’t need any more seasoning than a spoon of sea salt: the mushrooms flavour everything.

i went to the organic markets and bought just short of half a kilo of salty french-churned butter.

i found myself stepping, too casually, too often, into the jewelbox that is adriano zumbo: a mandarin macaron one day, a brioche stuffed with custard and mixed berries the next. or was it both on the same day? and another the next? i lose count.

oh! also, my sister got married, not that you’d know, since she hasn’t been blogging either.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 August 2007 at 8:42 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, kitchen, lunch, nellie, snacks, werk

today was all blue skies and fluffy clouds, perfect for a cupcake excursion! we caught a bus and a train, crossed two bridges, and walked out into the sunshine at kirribilli markets. we wandered through the maze of stalls, not really looking too hard, and then we found it: chocolate suze’s biscuit (and cupcake) stand, as advertised.

there were sample jars filled with little nuggets of shortbread, warmed by the sun, and a sign which told me to try as many as i wanted, so i did: white chocolate and cranberry shortbread, cranberry and pistachio, macadamia, ginger… there were as many different kinds of biscotti, including an intriguing pear and cardamon specimen. there was a shameless display of well-frosted cupcakes, overwhelmingly pink and copiously sprinkled. and there was chocolate suze, who i had never met before today, and is yet more proof that the innernet is my friend.

but we cannot stand around making small talk about butter; maeve is not so easily distracted when there are pink cupcakes about. with pink dragees! and that boy is going to get it! but he didn’t. we took the cupcake to the park, plonked ourselves down in the shade of the harbour bridge, and then she dug out all the dragees and ate whatever frosting she hadn’t licked off along the way. as an afterthought, she ate about half the cake too.

she was kind enough to offer me a nibble now and again, so i was able to ascertain that it was all sugary icing and buttery cake, and sometimes that is all i ask of it. and so it was that after a play in the playground, and another meander through the market, and a greasy gozleme on the bare patch of grass in the middle of it all, and a free facepaint in the likeness of a pink kitten, we ended up back at the cupcakes so that i could buy one of my very own, and bring it home with me.

“that is such a delicious and moist cupcake,” i gushed. “does it have a lot of butter in it?”

suze smiled a wicked smile. “yes,” she said, “and you don’t want to know how much.”

i thought i’d be eating it tonight, solace while i worked a crazy deadline. but an even crazier deadline has taken shape, making this evening just the calm before the storm. and so here it sits, biding its time, waiting for the morning when it will kill me a buttery death. it will be great!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 July 2007 at 10:48 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, kid, werk

i don’t get to wear my rainboots too often, a birthday gift from a few years ago, from my sister — one gift of thirty that she mailed me, madly, when i turned thirty. but today they kept my feet warm and dry in the big wet.

my house is the big empty this week; boy and maeve gone bush. yesterday, after waking at 5.30am to wave them off into the not-quite-sunrise, i tried to get back to sleep and then stayed in bed until ten-thirty, finishing off the novel that’s taken me many months and false starts and week-long lapses to get through. then, feeling unsettled, i tidied the house. i popped out to buy some art supplies, and lunch from bagel house. the NY reuben: pastrami, sauerkraut, pickles, cheese, all steaming in a toasted dill bagel. i rented a DVD from a hole in the wall. you reserve your movie online, show up at the great dispensing machine on the street, swipe your card, listen to the chunk-chunk of machinery, and then “infernal affairs 3” slides out the slot. (video store clerks? so 90s.) i bought tofu. i came home, and drew.

today, i drew (work) and painted (a dollhouse, pink). put on my boots, went back to the hole in the wall, got out “the devil wears prada”. at the post office, i bought the selvage of reg mombassa’s big things stamps. at about life, i propped myself up at the counter with a bottle of honey ginger beer, and ate a plate of bruschetta: three slices of perfectly toasted, garlic-infused bread, topped with marinated button mushrooms; artichoke puree; marinated peppers with pesto and goat cheese. and then because i could, i stopped at the fine food store and bought a tub of gundowring raspberry ice cream. for later.

i came home and drew some more. i’m working on a publication for an arts organisation — a sort of legal-aid-for-artists organisation. so i sent them a bunch of sketches for the cover design, and thought (hopefully) that they might go for the… dare i say, spunky, quirky, striking one. instead, they picked the ultra-traditional one: drawings of various artists’ tools contained within a grid. sigh. at least it will be the easiest one to produce.

i put on the heater, and a radio birdman LP. i lit my spicy tea-scented candle. i traced the roughs i had drawn this morning. because i have no lightbox, i trace standing up, with my paper flat against the window. i can only trace in the daytime, and it makes my arms ache.

my house is the big empty, and this hole that has opened up inside me, sunday night, things were said about mistakes made, shaky ground shifts again.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 26 June 2007 at 5:32 pm

permalink | filed under around town, boy, shoping, snacks, werk

another day, another macaron. or two! monday lunchtime, post-park, saw us tumble once again into adriano zumbo. my primary mission, because i had finally run out of bread in the house, was to try the chorizo-and-olive-stuffed baguette which i’d been eyeing for a couple of weeks: a club of bread into which had been baked sliced-up sausage and olives (and today, the counterboy informed me, also mushrooms and tomato.) you have questions, i’m sure: is it still a baguette if it has all this stuff in it, and cheese on top? the jury is still out on that one. is it tasty? oh yes. warmed up in the microwave, it was all moist salty bits all the way through a satisfyingly chewy dough. definitely not the featherweight baguette you might find around these parts (though who am i to judge them when i haven’t actually set teeth on an actual frainch baguette).

and the macarons? the pistachio was plump and hefty, and very, very sweet. i would rather have had a stronger pistachio flavour, and maybe some discernable nuttiness. the lavender was intensely perfumed, very lavendery, which is terrific if you are a fan of the herb. i love it in a handcream or a fancy soap, but i’ve always been a bit overwhelmed by the floweriness when i’ve eaten it. so it was with this encounter. still, i was impressed with its true flavour and luscious texture.

i was drawn to these macarons because of their pale, dusty hues. i am working on a brand-redevelopment project at the moment, and one of the tasks has been to come up with a new colour palette of muted tones. i don’t actually have to come up with the colours (or the layout, woohoo!) — it’s a collaborative project, and i get to discuss colours and typefaces and columns and footers with two other designers. it’s great!

what i do get to do is draw the pictures. it’s both a good thing and a bad thing, because i haven’t done an illustration job in years, and i’ve been itching to get back into it, but because i haven’t drawn to a brief in, well, years, it’s been quite a challenge to get my head into that space. i think i may have the main character worked out though; now i have to get cracking on the host of crafty monsters.

anyway. while i was sitting here doodling blobby shapes holding paintbrushes this evening, i discovered the storm that was brewing over the new london olympic logo. (yes, i’m aware that i would probably get more drawing done if i weren’t drawing at the edge of my desk with the internet on.) several clicks later, all i want to say at this point is, “how come i (will) never get paid £400,000 to design a logo?”.

and also, why have they used that hideous font?

oh ok. and also, the logo was designed (according to the press release), “reflecting a brand savvy world where people, especially young people, no longer relate to static logos but respond to a dynamic brand that works with new technology and across traditional and new media networks.” and so, the promotional video of coloured shards sweeping through the streets of london (in time with a slightly stressful and irritating soundtrack) actually works quite well. but then every time it appears — the static logo, frozen onscreen — argh!

the outline! the drop shadow! argh!

maybe they’ll have to “print” it — animated — on e-paper.

[ edit: mere hours later, you will not find the colour shards video at the link above, because “new olympic logo causes epileptic fits“. PAH.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 5 June 2007 at 10:23 pm

permalink | filed under cake, werk

torn.

torn between sleep, or blogging, or watching brainless tv, or “reading” that 754-page edition on american vogue that i found at the library last week. 754!

the book project? yes, a mere 124 pages, but it still lingers, the way a cartoon character leaves a dust cloud in the shape of itself after it’s skedaddled. the book lingers as the final, last-minute sunday midnight change to the final last-minute friday 5pm change. it lurks as the too big postscript files that refuse to be distilled on my seven-year-old computer that has to run select programs in classic mode. it taunts as the limit on the client’s bank transfer which prohibits the upfront payment being made to the printer which prevents the printer from telling me if the files i sent through last week are ok.

as it turns out, hmm, not really, which is why 6GB worth of raw postscript files are right now being burned onto DVDs for a second time lucky.

so let’s think back to happier times. like last friday, when i finally returned to adriano zumbo pastissier, and casually asked the counter boy (not adriano this time), “what flavours are the macarons today?”

rose. olive oil and vanilla. gianduja.

i don’t know that i could really have considered choosing just one, so in the end i got just one of each.

these are great macarons. they are hefty with moist and crumbly almond body — not like the weird, dessicated hollow shells i have encountered in other, lesser macarons — and their ganache fillings unusually soft (“runny” sounds bad, but really, it is so good). the rose one, gorgeous pink and all heady perfume, had a filling with a sort of evaporated milky flavour. it reminded me of bandung, that lurid indonesian beverage of rose syrup and milk, which i am quite partial to. i’m guessing it’s actually a white chocolate-based concoction.

the olive oil registered, not unpleasantly, on the roof of my mouth. it was an intriguing sensation: the ripe flavour without the oiliness, coupled with the fact that it was actually a sweet biscuit. i didn’t detect a lot of vanilla flavour in the filling, but the texture of it was sublime. i had been curious about this particular macaron since reading about robyn's pierre herme specimen, so now, curiousity sated and fond memories remain.

the gianduja… i think i’d really rather have a piece of actual velvety gianduja, studded with whole hazelnuts. but in macaron form, it was a classy hazelnutty biscuit with a not overly chocolatey finish.

and what business did i have, traipsing into patisseries on a friday afternoon?

friday morning, i had dropped the kid off to her very first day of playschool. i was kid-free! she’d been talking about going to school for some months (though i think the fact that she’d get to carry a backpack was the main attraction), and when we went for the open day a few weeks ago, and she saw that the kids in possum room were in the midst of a ballet class, she lunged at the door making little clawing motions (much like a small marsupial, no?) and said, “can i go in? and do ballet?”

thursday morning, when we attended a brief orientation session, and she discovered the sandpit in the back, she threw herself belly down in the sand, and swam around in it for a good while. she painted a picture in yellow and purple on the classroom easel. she went headfirst down the play yard slide.

so. friday morning, when i dropped her off, she got all quiet, and concentrated on the toy acquarium table while i made myself scarce. when i called to check on her at 11, she was busy with playdough. when i returned to pick her up at 4.30, after a day of grocery shopping and errands, she was busy making a plastic vegetable dinner at the wooden stove, and the afternoon’s face painting was now a half-butterfly smeared away from cheeks down. she was giddy with excitement and smiling. she can’t wait to go back again. phew.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 23 April 2007 at 10:50 pm

permalink | filed under cake, kid, werk

i finally went to see the tezuka exhibition at the art gallery on wednesday night, after a good day of shifting bits of text around the page. balance, right?

all those tiny, perfect, original drawings — page after page, yellowed with age — of astroboy and kimba and the other creations of a forty year career. the brush marks of still-white paint, drawn over with corrections. it made me want to weep, or draw. either.

i was wilting and hungry halfway through, so i went down to the gallery cafe and ordered chai: no longer listed as “chai latte” on the menu, thank god, and no longer delivered in a picardie glass. it came in a fat little teapot; pretty good tea service for three bucks. the sun had gone by then, on late-opening wednesday, so i sat at the counter against the big window, feeling the evening chill come through the plate glass. and i had to draw it, this perfect teapot. the priapism, sadly, is all my fault.

at a home decor shop yesterday, as i flipped through my notebook for window measurements, the shopgirl pointed at my drawing. “that’s really good,” she said, “do you do art?”

“um, sort of,” i said. i told her about astroboy and how i was compelled to draw after.

“i used to do fine arts,” she said, “but then i realised that there’s no money in it, and i would prefer to do something for people who told me what to do, and then paid me. so now i’m studying design.”

“that is so weird,” i said, “because i studied design, and every now and again, i think that i should be doing art, like drawing or printmaking.”

we talked about art schools. she gave me a price on roller blinds. it’s always PMS368 on the other side.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 13 April 2007 at 10:53 am

permalink | filed under around town, drawn, drink, shoping, werk

my father called the other morning.

“what are you doing?”

“working…”

“oh, that’s good!”

“hmm. you say it’s good, but you don’t know that the work is stupid, and the pay could be better.”

“then you are undercharging. you need to charge more.”

“but when you work for a non-profit organisation, you can’t charge normal, commercial rates.”

“then you can’t always work for non-profit organisations. don’t you want to work for a real company?”

“wellll. if i worked in a commercial setup i wouldn’t be able to stay home and look after a kid all day.”

“ah. you have a point,” he said, then, “where is the kid?”

“she’s gone on holidays.”

“what!? so why aren’t you there with her?”

“um, because i have to work?”

“but don’t you miss her?”

“no.”

“what!? why not!?”

“because, when you spend 24 hours a day looking after someone…”

“ah. i see.”

“and i have so much work to do. i mean, it is tricky to balance the work, and the kid –”

“that’s what life is all about, finding the balance.”

hungh.

another ridiculous thing i encountered earlier this week are the all-round party spoons from jamie oliver’s “easy entertaining” range for royal worcester, marked down at the david jones easter sale from $30 to $15. for six “oriental spoons” in a box. the catalogue pictures shows nine, which means a box and a half. (why do people serve food in these soup spoons anyway? why don’t they stop??)

don’t they know you can go to any chinatown supermarket, walk down the kitchenware aisle, and avail yourself of as many of these spoons as you care to, for about 70c a piece? maybe a dollar for one with a finer finish. the trendy homeware stores do the same trick with bamboo steamers: $30 for something that will cost you $5 at a neighbourhood “ethnic” shop. what has multiculturalism achieved, if not to bring affordable cooking utensils to the general populace?

ri.di.culo.us.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 13 April 2007 at 7:24 am

permalink | filed under grumble, werk

Category Archives: werk

Click

Search

Categories

Archives