Baking-Adjacent

It's April, and kitten season has begun. What does that mean for me?

It means I haven't had an uninterrupted night's sleep in almost three weeks, the kitten cam has 15 new subscribers (because who doesn't want to watch kittens, right?), and I'm actively believing that brown stain on my pant leg is kitten food. (No, you don't want to think about the alternatives. And it's entirely possible it is kitten food — weaning is a messy business.)

Big Chungus and Elmer are delightful, by which I mean they've each been full of delight when peeing on me during the post-bottle snuggles this week. Did I mention I've washed three loads of laundry this week?

Cute little jerks

One thing I'd forgotten about bottle feeding is what a pain in the butt it is to get kitten formula to dissolve. 90% goes into solution in the first 20 seconds, but the rest refuses to dissolve. And it can't have clumps or the nipple clogs. Trust me, you do not want one more reason for the kittens not to eat a full meal. Your life is already consumed their weights: Elmer requires the milk to be warm, so he needs to be fed first, but sometimes he needs a few minutes to wake up or he won't suckle. Chungus eats more even when he's half-asleep but takes forever. And did Elmer really lose 10 grams overnight? That's time to panic, right? Or wait, is that because he finally pooped?

On about the third day, I stopped doing the Shake Weight(TM) dance in the kitchen with a bottle of formula at 3am and switched to the immersion blender. That was a game changer. The only drawback is I had to prepare multiple meals at one time, because my immersion blender doesn't work with less than about five tablespoons of liquid.

But it occurred to me there might be some sort of miniature immersion blender. My searches for miniature mixers brought a bunch of hits for things that stirred paint, which wasn't helpful since I needed something food-safe. So I did what any rational person does when faced with a question about mixing small amounts of kitten formula:

I asked the people at King Arthur Baking.

Hear me out. This totally makes sense.

First off, these are possibly the kindest, most polite people in the world. Maybe they're born that way, or maybe they just work out all their aggressions by punching dough, I don't know. But it's true.

And second, they know everything there is to know about specialized food-safe gadgets. Like, someone will write in saying their arthritis prevents them from fizzling the outer rind of the stigglefruit (or whatever — I'm not a baker) and the people who answer questions on the page will immediately offer links for wide-handled stigglefruit fizzlers, packaged dried stigglefruit fizz, and a suggestion that coconut flakes could be substituted in a pinch as long as an extra teaspoon of water is added. Seriously. They know everything.

So I said "Hi, this is baking-adjacent (at best), but can you think of something that will do this?"

Upon reflection, I'm not sure why I thought mixing kitten formula might be considered "baking-adjacent". I can't actually come up with a way to connect kittens and baking at all. But I haven't had much sleep lately.

Anyhow, Kat wrote back almost immediately, asking if a "milk frother" would work. See what I mean? I didn't even know a milk frother was an actual thing one could buy, but it is. And they aren't even all that expensive. (Kat also requested kitten pictures, which I was more than happy to provide.)

So if you have a bottle feeder friend, consider buying them a milk frother for May Day. (Don't wait until Christmas. It's kitten season right now.) The immersion blender does a slightly better job breaking up all the clumps, but if you run the coil of the milk frother around the container edges after you blend, it will pick up any clumps so they don't end up in the bottle.

Pick your weapon!

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And here are some affiliate links for convenience:

My immersion blender: https://amzn.to/4cZibjf

My milk frother: https://amzn.to/4d4nEoQ

Just a Little Fun

Realized late last night that the 8.1 person in Daz Studio has a slider to make elf ears. So I had to use it.

(When I mentioned that I didn't know what to do with this render I'd created, my friend H. said, "Write a book with an elf MC and her tiny dragon friend, obviously." 

Maybe a short story...)

Less a Disaster?

So I slightly modified the render from the previous post and then messed with it in GIMP and threw a background together and...

I actually like this.

(As discussed previously, I have no taste, so maybe this is unforgivably cheesy, but... meh, I like it anyway.)

I still need to ruin it with the typography, but I think this is what I'm going to go with.

Creating a New Disaster

I've been working on narrating the audiobook for Shift Happens off-and-on for the last few months. Let me tell you, this is the first time in my life that I've been really sorry I've never acted in anything. But that's not the point of today's post.

It occurred to me recently, that I need to have a cover for the audiobook. I have a cover for the ebook:

It's fine, but

1. Audiobook covers are square instead of rectangular (because of course they are, dammit), which means I would need to go back to the original designer and pay another $60, and
2. I really wish the dragon on the cover didn't look quite so much like a demon (but not so much that I'm willing to pay an artist to do it differently).

I've learned some stuff in the last few years, so I thought I'd make a stab at creating a new cover. It's very probable that I'll give up and just pay the $60 to get the square audiobook cover, but why not try a few things first?

So I bought a dragon. I went with the Millennium Dragon instead of the standard DAZ Dragon 3, because

1. The Millennium Dragon is $20. The other one would have ended up being about five times that after I added in all the other stuff I'd need so it wasn't pure white.
2. I just didn't like how demon-like the DAZ dragon is. I'm looking for more of a friendly dragon vibe.

I did a rough version of the render today to see how it would look and got this. (Pretend there's a background.)

I wasn't worried about the dang hair (which I've struggled with in DAZ before) because I knew I wanted to do a face swap. Have I ever done a face swap? No. But how hard can it be? I also made the dragon's eye blue so it would stand out more.

So this is my rough and dirty first version:

Things I want to improve in DAZ:

1. Add gloves so her hands don't look so weird.
2. Add a background (Maybe? Maybe I should just add a bunch of fire and fog afterward, similar to what's going on in the current cover.)
3. Change the lighting so it's coming from the left, just like the face
4. Figure out how to get rid of the bleb on the dragon's nose
5. Maybe move one leg forward on the dragon?

I'll need to do a bunch of post-processing in GIMP, but I need to get the render stuff right before I do that.

Sure. I can totally do this.

Day 29: Bad Magic

Welcome back to Thingadailies.

If I were plotting Thingadailies, I would be ending on a high point — maybe an image that showed off all the skills I've learned this month. But no. I'm ending the month with something random, which is totally in keeping with previous Thingadailies.

After trying to find something I wanted to do, I settled on this tutorial on Glowing Magic Effects, which would be practical for me to learn. Unfortunately, I wasn't really in a "follow the directions" sort of mood, and also, it turns out I have no idea how to determine the saturation of a color. So I diverged from the tutorial pretty quickly.

Still, it was kind of interesting, so I'm leaving it here. (Also, I have to post something.)

Step 1: Draw the basic shape with a color that has 50% saturation.

Or, if you're me, ignore that thing about saturation because it's a word that doesn't really have any meaning, and pick a color and draw a shape.

Step 2: Sketch out the curves so it looks more smokey

Step 3: Increase the saturation and add highlights.

The interesting thing here was switching the pen mode to "dodge". Also I had started messing with colors by this point.

Step 4: Ignore the tutorial and start adding random colors.

Does it look like a stream of magic? No. Did I follow the tutorial? Also no. But I did end up with kind of a cool swirled thing.

That's it for Thingadailies! Join me next year!

Tip of the day:

Switch the pen mode to get different effects. Dodge is a fun one.

(Just added the tags and it turns out the "Not following directions" was a tag that already existed. Excellent branding, T!)

Day 28: Northern Lights

Welcome back to Thingadailies. Today I decided to follow this tutorial on creating northern lights.

Step 1: Find a picture of the night sky

DepositPhotos is my friend here. (Depositphotos_243388432)

Step 2: Add a purple gradient as a background to the northern lights

The first time I did this, the purple disappeared when I switched the layer to overlay mode. I ended up desaturating the original picture and then adding the overlay. (Was there some other way to do that? I don't know.)

Step 3: Add some green

In this step, I used a brush with the jitter turned up so it gave me a bunch of somewhat random blobs.

Step 4: Linear motion blur

For whatever reason, I couldn't get the linear motion blur to work until I resized the canvas to something smaller, which was fine in this case because I started out with something huge — I resized it down to 3500x2500 pixels. It started out as 11850 × 7908. But still, I'm not sure why GIMP just didn't do anything with the linear motion blur instead of... crashing or something obvious like that.

You can see things are starting to take shape.

Step 5: Repeat (on different layers) those steps for a couple other colors

Step 6: Firm up the lower edge

Step 7: Warp it

Yes, this is where GIMP really falls down. So I moved into Photopea.

(Why didn't I use Photopea from the start? Mostly because I'm familiar with GIMP. But also because Photopea has a bunch of moving ads on the side and I'm too cheap to pay $15 to make them go away for three months.)

After warping it, we did another linear motion blur, this time horizontally, in order to get rid of the lines.

I think I switched the layer combination to "hard light".

Step 8: Repeat

Copy the layer a couple times, warp the layers, and change the opacity to make things blend.

And there we are. Northern lights!

I think I could have blended the lower band of light with the green band a little better, but it's a decent first try.

Tip of the day:

To warp in Photopea, Edit->Free Transform, then click the Warp button on the upper right.

Day 27: Everything is Better with Glitter

Welcome back to Thingadailies. We're currently working on a version of this Cat Butterfly Manipulation Photoshop Tutorial.

Today we're going to finish this image and prove that everything is better with glitter!

When we left off yesterday, Sabrett was facing the dragon:

Step 1: Get some glitter/sparkles

(Yeah, I went ahead and spent another $0.33 on this. Trust me, I'll use it again.)

Step 2: Use the "screen" option to infuse the sparkle layer into the image

I spent twenty seconds looking up what "screen" actually does, found the equation that explained it, and decided I would just accept it pulls bright things in and makes them brighter. We ended up with this:

Step 3: Create one visible layer and change the "camera raw" settings to make it look better

Okay. So for the most part, GIMP contains nearly every feature found in Photoshop. But this was one of the exceptions. It looks like I could download some filters to do this. Honestly, if I knew what I was doing, I'm sure I could do all of it through the other features already available in GIMP.

But today I saw a link to Photopea — a free Photoshop analog that runs in your browser — and I wanted to try it out. So I exported my file as a .psd file and pulled it into Photopea. I'm pretty impressed with how responsive it is. And it had most of the "camera raw" settings that were used in the tutorial.

Anyhow, I increased the temperature and contrast and it looks very spiffy. I'm calling it good.

It would look even better if I'd started with a less blurry kitten picture, but we can't have everything.

What should I do for the next two days? I'll wander through some available tutorials and see what I can find...

Tip of the day:

To get the sparkles to shine, use the "screen" option.