Your Local Mom Artist

🍞HOW TO: Brown Oatmeal Soda Bread with Ginger and Apricot

Hey everyone! One of my favorite bread recipes to make is Brown Oatmeal Soda bread- it’s incredibly easy to make with only a few ingredients in a short time. This is a twist on the classic, with dried apricots, crystallized ginger, and spices for more flavor!

🍀Ingredients:

-2 ¼ cups all purpose flour

-2 teaspoons baking soda

-1 teaspoon double acting baking powder

-2 teaspoons salt

-2 cups whole wheat flour

-1 cup old fashioned rolled oats

-2 cups buttermilk

-1 large egg, beaten slightly

🍊Extras:

-1 cup crystallized ginger, diced

-1 cup dried apricots, diced

-½ teaspoon cardamom

-½ teaspoon ground ginger

-zest of one lemon and one orange

☀️Directions:

-Preheat oven to 350 degrees

-Sift both flours, baking soda, baking powder, and salt together in a large bowl. Stir in oats.

-Add the egg and buttermilk and stir using spatula until mixture forms dough

-At this point, you can add the optional dried fruit, ginger, and spices

-Turn dough onto floured surface and knead until its all clumped together (at first it will be very crumbly)

-Halve the dough and form two round loaves. Slice x’s into the top and sprinkle more some oats for a garnish.

-Bake them on a greased sheet for 40-45 minutes

☕️You’re all done! Enjoy with a cup of tea or toasted in the morning for breakfast!

In all my art classes, I was never taught HOW to use the various tools of art.

Like yes, form, and shape and space and color theory and figure drawing is important, but so is KNOWING what different tools do.

I’m 29 and I JUST learned this past month that India Ink is fucking waterproof when it dries. Why is this important? Because I can line something in India Ink and then go over it with watercolors. And that has CHANGED the ENTIRE way I art and the ease I can create with.

-Yo painters, use pencil if u must underdraw beneath an oil painting, the lead is archival but ideally you should be doing underdrawings in a muted earth tones (siennas, umbers, ochres or earth green) with some titanium white added to it. (The white nearly matches the canvas and earth tones naturally blend with all colors on top unless u do super thin glaze washes).

-Trying to make a natural looking warm black? Don’t use black straight from tube, Mix alizarin crimson and viridan. add raw umber to adjust for light depth.

-If your into mixed media ALWAYS use acrylic first and oil on top (the gesso on primed canvas is acrylic based and oil sits on top of it great). NEVER put acrylic paint on top of oil, the acrylic will crackle/decompose and fall apart/off the canvas.

-India ink is permanent and if your using ink from a jar it should say it’s permanence. professional art grade pens usually have there permanace listed either on the pen or the companies website.

-Red cinnabar is poisonous, DO NOT EAT IT, no matter how much like fruit loops it smells.

-Translucent and transparent are NOT the same. translucent is *shiny* and a cloudier color, ideal for mixing usually ordor making vibrant colors like for eyes, cars, etc. Transparent is matte and usually a 50% transparency from an opaque color.

-ALWAYS DO A TEST SWATCH OF ANY NEW MATERIAL.

-any paint made with “true alizarin crimson” “red lake” and “chrome yellow” pigment is a fugitive paint. Fugitive means the pigment fades dramatically and disappears over time, (usually 5 to 15 years) lots of van goghs paintings have this problem. be very careful with these pigments. Alizarin crimson especially smells extremely sweet and like fruit loops or fruit loops, don’t eat it.

-gauche is a mix of watercolor and ink, proceed with caution as this material can be an asshole.

-Watercolor can be made darker/thicker by letting it dry slightly in cake form or in liquid form and can be dry brushed if u get the timing down.

-Paint liquid rubber or lay down thin pieces of painters tape on edges in watercolor paintings to Prevent bleeding between lines if u need super sharp edges.

-always tape down the entire paper edges when u paint with watercolor to a board to prevent the paper from curling as it dries.

-add salt directly into wet watercolor paintings to absorb pigment and make shit look like space.

-Always paint in well ventilated areas and avoid getting lots of paint on your hands. lots of paint is made with heavy metals and can cause cancer.

-natural materials aren’t always safe, especially

-Ones u collect yourself, do your research before grinding, burning, sanding these things especially indoors.

-natural sable is good for watercolor if you can afford it, i have two smaller brushes i shelled out for to try it, and while i probably didn’t treat the finer point one right, the other one is a miracle i’ve had for nearly 20 years.

here are tips I discovered very recently:

something is better than nothing. 5 minutes of work are better than zero. Just because you missed something on your schedule doesn’t mean you can’t still work on it, even for 5 minutes. Grow and build on this.

second drafts / reviews can be done after.

Don’t think you are going to do your very best work on the first try. Take the weight of perfectionism off your shoulders.

don’t think about doing it. just do it as fast as you can.

build on your productivity, not your failures.

If you come from a past of procrastinating and now feel motivated to change and discipline yourself, do NOT try to do everything at once.

if you have a set of different goals to accomplish, begin with the most important one. Wait until the rotine of working for that one settles in (you feel productive and comfortable-ish), and then begin with the next. Repeat.

this way you’ll be building your way up and not juggling everything at the same time, hoping everything works out.

be patient with yourself, you’ll get there!

set smaller deadlines for your goals

have monthly and weekly-ish deadlines

e.g. if you are doing a project, due 22nd Feb, set personal deadlines, like have Introduction written by 2nd Feb, have Methods written by 10th Feb, have project complete by 18th Feb.

take them as seriously as you possibly can, don’t miss out on yourself.

write realistic daily tasks and don’t stop until you finish them. after them you can do whatever you want

on writing realistic daily tasks, the secret is knowing you can only do so much in one day, but trusting you can accomplish everything in the course of any period of time (a week, or 2 weeks or a month, etc.) because you will combine the work from all these different days.

it’s very tempting to write down all the tasks you need to accomplish in one day to just get over with it, but the real deal is you won’t accomplish half of them. You’ll feel very unproductive then, wich leads to demotivation.

spread daily tasks in the time necessary.

have a consistent sleep schedule.

if your mind isn’t ready everything will fall apart.

have one rest day per week where you plan nothing, do whatever you want except studying. this can be harder than you expect!

Do you design a lot of characters living in not-modern eras and you’re tired of combing through google for the perfect outfit references? Well I got good news for you kiddo, this website has you covered! Originally @modmad made a post about it, but her link stopped working and I managed to fix it, so here’s a new post. Basically, this is a costume rental website for plays and stage shows and what not, they have outfits for several different decades from medieval to the 1980s. LOOK AT THIS SELECTION:

OPEN ANY CATEGORY AND OH LORDY–

azasona

Exploring more my two-headed horse idea which I’ve decided to name “corsels” - an offshoot of the spanish word for noble steed, ‘corcel’.

Wanted to have some fun with coats, some organic and others not so, to see how they could look like in wild, domestic, or even fantasy/high fiction settings. Admittedly I wanted to originally call the “faux single” pinto head coat “the oreo” because that’s exactly what I was going for - but didn’t think it may fit well in many other settings aside from our modern one. I changed it to “faux single” because the pattern is supposed to create the illusion that the double heads look like a single one when both faced forward.

We’ll be exploring saddle and rein ideas soon. Heavily studying what horse team reins look like as they will likely be the strongest candidate, but we’ll see alternate variations as well.

That being said, I want to express that the Corsels are FREE TO USE for your own stories, RPs, DnD campaigns, and/or other fictional settings. I only authorize its use for fun, not for profit.