Kat Johnston

Tag: pink

  • Sanu in SL: You can’t wear a cupcake on your head… or can you?

    Kat Johnston/Sanu in SL: Tasty cuppies are utterly delicious. These are date-loaf cupcakes with a raspberry and wild hibiscus buttercream.Kat Johnston/Sanu in SL: Tasty cuppies are utterly delicious. These are date-loaf cupcakes with a raspberry and wild hibiscus buttercream.

    I’m posting a picture of a cupcake today, because I’d like to show how my everyday life ties into my creative pursuits. I baked those cupcakes last night – they’re a date-loaf cupcake with a liberal serving of raspberry and hibiscus buttercream.

    In case you were curious as to how I got the two-toned icing, I used a piece of parchment paper to divide the piping bag before scooping in the different colours – one to either side. Carefully remove the parchment and voila! Perfectly consistent two-toned icing in your piping bag. I love beautifully presented food, so I am trying a little harder to make even the common cupcake look wildly delicious.

    So how does this relate to Second Life, anyway?

    Kat Johnston/Sanu in SL: now for the Second Life translation… a cupcake on one’s head.

    The things that I enjoy in real life inform what I do in the second. I may not be able to eat as many cupcakes as I want or wear one on my head in the real world, but I’ll be darned if I can’t enjoy it in a virtual one, where something as simple as a food item can become a fashion statement in itself. You don’t get the joy of actually eating it, but luckily you get to dodge the calories too!

    The cupcake pictured is currently one of a whole heap currently available in the lucky cuppie at Sanu.

    Additional images of the real life cupcakes, including Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licensed photos can be found in my Baking/Cooking Flickr set.

  • Sanu in SL: Time for a skin (and a chat about resources).

    Kat Johnston/Sanu in SL: A gorgeous pink skin made with a hint of strawberry inspiration for Second Life.

    So, for today’s image, I’ve decided that I’m going to put up another Second Life item. I know it seems as if I am doing that a lot lately, but I swear it isn’t just because my scanner had an unfortunate run-in with some unidentified liquid and isn’t scanning correctly… it is also just because I think that seeing Second Life from an outsider sort of perspective is fun.

    Today’s item is a skin I put together – one inspired, in part, by delicious strawberries. Mmm, strawberries… *drools*

    Skins are an incredible and popular item in Second Life, as you can well expect. As in real life, they form the whole basis for snap-decisions and first impressions about someone when you meet them in person. They range from the photo-realistic to the hand-drawn and detailed, from the avant-garde to the downright quirky.

    Now onto the interesting side of things.

    This skin that I’ve made here would probably not have been created if it were not for another content creator on the grid. A content creator who made an absolutely massive impact to Second Life by giving people a number of open-source tools with which to learn, grow and experiment creatively without the added barrier of starting from scratch in skin and avatar mesh texture production. Eloh Eliot released skins she had created full-perm in-world, with detailed Photoshop source files also available for download back in 2008. Since then, an incredible number of people have used those resources to springboard into content creation, from casual creativity to professional, from modding for personal use to setting up businesses to send the final results.

    So I guess this is what I’m getting at: creativity begets more creativity.

    In a creative economy, knowledge and creativity are not necessarily (or even often) diminished by sharing. There was some measure of outcry when Eloh released her skins and templates for anyone to modify and redistribute. They allowed even the most unskilled to lend their hand to giving skin-making a go. The sky inevitably did not fall, talented artists and designers were still able to design, market and sell their own lines successfully, and the ability for more people to access information and resources surrounding a particular skill-set did not cause the demise of the ‘high priced’ skin industry as we know it. Not only has it opened up the doors to anyone to try skin-making, but it has also given others the opportunity to step up their game and improve their own processes. Competition isn’t always a bad thing!

    I’ve found watching the evolution of the Second Life skin industry over the past couple of years to be absolutely fascinating. To me, the way people in Second Life have reacted to the release of those skins has mirrored the reactions I see around me to the creative commons movement – some have thought the sky was falling, and still do… others did, but have slowly changed their opinions… and still others have absolutely welcomed the influx of opportunities provided to both the casual and professional creatives to be inspired by and build upon what others have created. I, for one, am excited by it.

    So yes, that is my post for today – long though it may be. I hope I haven’t bored you to death!

  • Sketch: It’s been a while…

    Kat Johnston – my little girl looks to a star above…

    9 days in fact. My apologies – it’s been one heck of a couple of weeks. Builders in and out of the house, real-estate agents not wanting to give straight answers, not getting a job I would have liked to have gotten, I have to get surgery because my knee is not behaving… all in all, it’s been a just a teensie bit rotten. But that’s ok. Because I have a sketch for you!

    You know how I’ve mentioned my ‘little girl’ before? This is her. She’s a reoccurring character that I draw over and over, here and there. And she’s cute!

    Ok, so onto something a little different. I went to a concert last night – the Pink Funhouse Tour concert. When Pink actually got to the stage, it was an absolutely fantastic show. She was brilliant. What was, however, disappointing about the night, was waiting for the actual concert to start. The tickets say ‘7:30’, so I expect an opening act, and then Pink to be on the stage by say… ohh… 8:00, or perhaps 8:30, tops. But noooo… it was already 9:15 by the time it got to the actual concert.

    That, my friends, was a little disappointing – if we weren’t set on watching the main act, I would have walked out the door by 9. After all, you pay to see Pink, not Faker and a DJ for almost 2 hours. Not that Faker was bad or anything, and the DJ was actually fairly brilliant, but when you’re waiting for the main act, you don’t want to sit there and listen to something else for so long – it didn’t seem to pump up the crowd for the main act, it just seemed to draw out the time until it actually happened. Hopefully it was just a ‘first night in Brisbane’ type mishap backstage that made the wait so incredibly, incredibly long.

    But the wait aside, the actual concert part of the night itself was fantastic. Pink really knows how to move around a stage and sing while being tossed this way and that in incredible feats of acrobatics, and the stage-show itself was just brilliant. Pink, not surprisingly, sung incredibly well, and even proved she wasn’t lip-syncing a couple of times by forgetting the words. Phew! Yay for the Pink concert!

    I’m so not apologizing for enjoying awesome pop music by the way. So there!

  • Sketch: Broth… Heaven’s healing food.

    Kat Johnston Sketch: Broth… it is the most wonderful food on the planet. Welll…. it’s in the top 10, at the very least.

    Broth: a healing, warming food unlike any other. I love broth so incredibly much, especially if it comes with a rich, flavourful base. The reason that I drew broth today, of all things, is because I had it for my lunch!

    I was sitting at my keyboard, after doing my blog-reading for the day, wondering, as I often do, whether there is anything actually edible in the kitchen… when I was hit with a brilliant idea. I plodded upstairs, peeking my nose into the pantry, rustling around for the thing that had caught my delicious mouth-watering inducing imagination: soup. Noodle soup. Or more correctly noodles in broth.

    There, hidden under the cous cous and tucked behind a single packet of satay microwave rice rested my target – a packet of Trident brand laksa soup with those particularly tasty square noodles that curl into little tubes when they’re plunged into boiling water and cooked for a short amount of time.

    With the broth prepared, the seasoning added, the little sashet of flavoured oil stirred to blend it all together, I consumed that bowl of broth with the kind of relish generally reserved for a succulent cut of prime steak after having to subsist on packet noodles for weeks at a stretch. I’m not sure that there is anything more healing, more warming, more wonderful, than warm broth on a cooling day.

  • Sketch: I’m just tired.

    Kat Johnston: I’m feeling tired… I really am.

    I’m going to make this a fairly short post today… I’m tired. This is a picture to state that… yes, very, very literal I know. But some days, you just can’t get a whole heap of inspiration when you’re lusting after some sleep on your very favourite pillow.

    That is all.