OMG, I'm still alive! And posting pics of cookies! (Because otherwise, I'd be grading DDD:)
Hello, lj people!! It's been forever! Basically, my life blew up early this summer, though it's slowly coming back together and I'm not here to talk about that, but just to post some pics of some cookies I made in early August.
Sadly, almost none of them survived the morning that I took the pictures because of freakish humidity, so if you're into the ephemeral, you can celebrate (or mourn) the fact that within moments, most of these died horrible decapitation deaths.
A preview:
So, ever since Cookiepocalypse, I've been wanting to do the rest of what I call the 5x10 Marching Band cookies so that this guy wouldn't be lonely:
A refresher on this costume set:
*coughs*
Yeah, this was a great idea on my part, seriously.
Some closeups and detail shots of everyone!
Ohno: It's like he's a wee mariachi band member&hearts!
Sho: The lacing! Probably my favorite costume of the set--I love the contrasts and the vertical details&hearts
*shakes head* Oh, Aiba . . . you and your manpris >_<
On the other hand, I love the red and black stripes on his handkerchief and jacket cuffs, so I'll give him a pass this one time.
As bitterbee has commented, Nino's pants are fascinating.
Why yes, those are black pants with silver brocade, and asymmetrical patches of red and on the left (Nino's left) side, there are in fact stripes of black affixed by brass buttons across the red. Not to mention the triangular red bits on his other side.
Like she said, fascinating. ^_^v I could stare at Nino's pants forever ^^;
I still love Jun's costume, too, right down to the tiny red polka dots on his little skinny . . . tie? bolo? What the hell does one call that thing??
Jun: Wouldn't you like to know?
Seriously, does anyone know what that thing is called? It's driving me nuts ^^;
On to the cookies!
Concept sketches!
Ohno!
Sho!
Aiba!
Nino!
Jun!
So, one of the "fun" aspects of these costumes is that not only are they insanely detailed, but most of the details . . have details--so lots of textures, and black on blacks with sequins, or button-down shirts with tonal glitter or sequins, and such, not to mention Sho's lacing. So one of the challenges with this set of cookies was deciding what order I needed to do things so that I wasn't having to constantly remix colors of icing, and that things like glitter would be applied at times least likely to destroy other parts of the cookies.
While they generally came out okay, I think there are some things I will definitely change before I tackle these again.
Some progress shots!
As usual, I started with black food coloring markers to sketch out a template on the cookie:
Ohno's template, with some yellow details added:
After that, I piped yellow royal icing to make the pattern on the sides of Ohno's pants, as you can see above. In retrospect, this was perhaps a mistake--my thinking at the time was that I'd be able to apply the gold glaze and glitter on them like this so they woudn't run into the black.
Anyone wanna guess why I don't want to do it quite this way again?
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
This was a severe pain in the rear:
All those tiny compartments >_< *shudders* It took forever.
And it still came out a bit messy. ORZ And after the black royal icing, I added black edible glitter, because those pants? They are sparkly&hearts And I have to say, sparkly pants on Ohno simply draws more attention to what's going on under the pants, and that can only be a good thing, because damn, that man can dance ^_^v
So next time, I think I'll do the black first, add the black edible glitter for the sequins and pipe the gold on top and take my chances with the glitter. We'll see how it turns out ^_^v
One of my favorite details on Aiba's costume was the black vest with gold glitter:
There's also black glitter on the chevrons on his chest and the black stripes down the side of his pants:
More Aiba in progress:
After Ohno and Aiba, I totally spaced on individual shots, but did take some interim group progress shots, and you can kind of get an idea of the chaos from them:
NINO'S PANTS&hearts
Here's a better pic of Nino's pants later in the process:
FASCINATING ^^;
So, to replicate the subtle-ish silver brocade texture on the pants, I decided not to go with silver glitter, which I thought would be too garish (in an Arashi costume? NEVER), so I brushed a transparent white glitter over the pants to pick up the sparkle and approximate a more subdued shiny texture:
Though my camera is crap at sparkles, I think you can get the basic idea here:
Some details on the top of Nino's costume:
I fudged the gold details on the vest, but think they're relatively close. You can't see it here, but he had white shiny glitter/rhinestones in lines down the front of his button-up shirt, in the same pattern as Sho's golden sparkles on his black shirt--I used iridescent white glitter to show that, but my camera is crap at catching glitter.
Also, black glitter on the bottom of his tie--since Nino's black tie had black rhinestones, just to torment me.
A couple more Nino shots, pre-hair:
With hair!
Here are the hairless and completed Jun cookies.
Hairless:
Completed!
To be honest, I think the original one came out a bit better. I have ideas of how to do better next time ^^;
Sooo . . . notice how there were 3 hairless and then 2 completed? The carnage had begun. Directly following these pictures, more decapitations. I think it was 95% humidity, and the cookies . . . well, they didn't like it.
To be fair, I didn't like it either, but at least I remained intact.
Some finished Aiba pics!
BUTTONS&hearts! I love the little buttons on his vest!
*squees* I still love the stripes--yay for food coloring markers!
Some Ohno details:
You would not believe how many little details his chest had. Sadly, the icing texture got wonky--I'm looking forward to attacking this again^^;
Finished!Ohno ^_^v
Finally, Sho!
Sho's lacing pretty much made my day, so I'm going to subject you to all sorts of pictures of it!
Honestly, I was really worried about this detail, but it was actually really easy: I piped one direction and then returned with the cross-laces, all in a row. The important thing was that the icing was dry--firm enough not to absorb into itself and look messy, but moist enough to shape and flow evenly, and to stick to the cookie. In the end, I think it looked pretty decent ^_^v
Moar lacing!
I know I used this shot before the cut, but I still like it, so . . .
The end result:
You do not want to know how few of these survived the hour >_<
Because I am clearly a masochist with a very shallow learning curve, I also repeated a few older favorites, with some adjustments:
Friendship, now with much better hair!
Seriously, compared to the older version, I think this is a major improvement:
Original:
Most recent:
What do you think? To me, it looks more like his Time (2007) hair!
I also revisited Yabaix3, but . . . wasn't so happy with it--I should have left the black bands between the leg stripes, I think . . .
Oh well. Because I want my own Yabais and these tragically died, I'll remake them better next time!
Another repeat:
And finally, because I couldn't help myself, the return of the disco clowns!
>_>
Um . . I have no idea how I missed taking a picture of Sho O__o
Have a shiny!pic of Nino instead:
*sighs* four of these had lost heads or limbs by the time I went back into the house. The humidity just annihilated them :P Also, I didn't notice until later,w hen I was uploading these, but Ohno is missing his fringe DDD: Clearly, I was delirious by this point in the game.
On the other hand, I think piping the gold stars and butterflies really added a lot to them!
Older versions vs newer:
Older
Newer:
So that was the most recent cookie foray! I'm planning a more traditional episode picspam soon, so probably no cookies for quite a while now that the semester is in full swing ^^;
I leave you with my amusingly-coordinated nails and tea cup--I didn't notice this until the day was half-done ^^;
Someday, I swear I'm going to do a post of my ridiculous polish collection, and maybe my even more ridiculous "action" figure collection, but not today ^^;
Hey there, flist! Long time, no see&hearts How goes it?
Sadly, almost none of them survived the morning that I took the pictures because of freakish humidity, so if you're into the ephemeral, you can celebrate (or mourn) the fact that within moments, most of these died horrible decapitation deaths.
A preview:
So, ever since Cookiepocalypse, I've been wanting to do the rest of what I call the 5x10 Marching Band cookies so that this guy wouldn't be lonely:
A refresher on this costume set:
*coughs*
Yeah, this was a great idea on my part, seriously.
Some closeups and detail shots of everyone!
Ohno: It's like he's a wee mariachi band member&hearts!
Sho: The lacing! Probably my favorite costume of the set--I love the contrasts and the vertical details&hearts
*shakes head* Oh, Aiba . . . you and your manpris >_<
On the other hand, I love the red and black stripes on his handkerchief and jacket cuffs, so I'll give him a pass this one time.
As bitterbee has commented, Nino's pants are fascinating.
Why yes, those are black pants with silver brocade, and asymmetrical patches of red and on the left (Nino's left) side, there are in fact stripes of black affixed by brass buttons across the red. Not to mention the triangular red bits on his other side.
Like she said, fascinating. ^_^v I could stare at Nino's pants forever ^^;
I still love Jun's costume, too, right down to the tiny red polka dots on his little skinny . . . tie? bolo? What the hell does one call that thing??
Jun: Wouldn't you like to know?
Seriously, does anyone know what that thing is called? It's driving me nuts ^^;
On to the cookies!
Concept sketches!
Ohno!
Sho!
Aiba!
Nino!
Jun!
So, one of the "fun" aspects of these costumes is that not only are they insanely detailed, but most of the details . . have details--so lots of textures, and black on blacks with sequins, or button-down shirts with tonal glitter or sequins, and such, not to mention Sho's lacing. So one of the challenges with this set of cookies was deciding what order I needed to do things so that I wasn't having to constantly remix colors of icing, and that things like glitter would be applied at times least likely to destroy other parts of the cookies.
While they generally came out okay, I think there are some things I will definitely change before I tackle these again.
Some progress shots!
As usual, I started with black food coloring markers to sketch out a template on the cookie:
Ohno's template, with some yellow details added:
After that, I piped yellow royal icing to make the pattern on the sides of Ohno's pants, as you can see above. In retrospect, this was perhaps a mistake--my thinking at the time was that I'd be able to apply the gold glaze and glitter on them like this so they woudn't run into the black.
Anyone wanna guess why I don't want to do it quite this way again?
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
This was a severe pain in the rear:
All those tiny compartments >_< *shudders* It took forever.
And it still came out a bit messy. ORZ And after the black royal icing, I added black edible glitter, because those pants? They are sparkly&hearts And I have to say, sparkly pants on Ohno simply draws more attention to what's going on under the pants, and that can only be a good thing, because damn, that man can dance ^_^v
So next time, I think I'll do the black first, add the black edible glitter for the sequins and pipe the gold on top and take my chances with the glitter. We'll see how it turns out ^_^v
One of my favorite details on Aiba's costume was the black vest with gold glitter:
There's also black glitter on the chevrons on his chest and the black stripes down the side of his pants:
More Aiba in progress:
After Ohno and Aiba, I totally spaced on individual shots, but did take some interim group progress shots, and you can kind of get an idea of the chaos from them:
NINO'S PANTS&hearts
Here's a better pic of Nino's pants later in the process:
FASCINATING ^^;
So, to replicate the subtle-ish silver brocade texture on the pants, I decided not to go with silver glitter, which I thought would be too garish (in an Arashi costume? NEVER), so I brushed a transparent white glitter over the pants to pick up the sparkle and approximate a more subdued shiny texture:
Though my camera is crap at sparkles, I think you can get the basic idea here:
Some details on the top of Nino's costume:
I fudged the gold details on the vest, but think they're relatively close. You can't see it here, but he had white shiny glitter/rhinestones in lines down the front of his button-up shirt, in the same pattern as Sho's golden sparkles on his black shirt--I used iridescent white glitter to show that, but my camera is crap at catching glitter.
Also, black glitter on the bottom of his tie--since Nino's black tie had black rhinestones, just to torment me.
A couple more Nino shots, pre-hair:
With hair!
Here are the hairless and completed Jun cookies.
Hairless:
Completed!
To be honest, I think the original one came out a bit better. I have ideas of how to do better next time ^^;
Sooo . . . notice how there were 3 hairless and then 2 completed? The carnage had begun. Directly following these pictures, more decapitations. I think it was 95% humidity, and the cookies . . . well, they didn't like it.
To be fair, I didn't like it either, but at least I remained intact.
Some finished Aiba pics!
BUTTONS&hearts! I love the little buttons on his vest!
*squees* I still love the stripes--yay for food coloring markers!
Some Ohno details:
You would not believe how many little details his chest had. Sadly, the icing texture got wonky--I'm looking forward to attacking this again^^;
Finished!Ohno ^_^v
Finally, Sho!
Sho's lacing pretty much made my day, so I'm going to subject you to all sorts of pictures of it!
Honestly, I was really worried about this detail, but it was actually really easy: I piped one direction and then returned with the cross-laces, all in a row. The important thing was that the icing was dry--firm enough not to absorb into itself and look messy, but moist enough to shape and flow evenly, and to stick to the cookie. In the end, I think it looked pretty decent ^_^v
Moar lacing!
I know I used this shot before the cut, but I still like it, so . . .
The end result:
You do not want to know how few of these survived the hour >_<
Because I am clearly a masochist with a very shallow learning curve, I also repeated a few older favorites, with some adjustments:
Friendship, now with much better hair!
Seriously, compared to the older version, I think this is a major improvement:
Original:
Most recent:
What do you think? To me, it looks more like his Time (2007) hair!
I also revisited Yabaix3, but . . . wasn't so happy with it--I should have left the black bands between the leg stripes, I think . . .
Oh well. Because I want my own Yabais and these tragically died, I'll remake them better next time!
Another repeat:
And finally, because I couldn't help myself, the return of the disco clowns!
>_>
Um . . I have no idea how I missed taking a picture of Sho O__o
Have a shiny!pic of Nino instead:
*sighs* four of these had lost heads or limbs by the time I went back into the house. The humidity just annihilated them :P Also, I didn't notice until later,w hen I was uploading these, but Ohno is missing his fringe DDD: Clearly, I was delirious by this point in the game.
On the other hand, I think piping the gold stars and butterflies really added a lot to them!
Older versions vs newer:
Older
Newer:
So that was the most recent cookie foray! I'm planning a more traditional episode picspam soon, so probably no cookies for quite a while now that the semester is in full swing ^^;
I leave you with my amusingly-coordinated nails and tea cup--I didn't notice this until the day was half-done ^^;
Someday, I swear I'm going to do a post of my ridiculous polish collection, and maybe my even more ridiculous "action" figure collection, but not today ^^;
Hey there, flist! Long time, no see&hearts How goes it?