Max Riffner is Awesome

I just got a really nice review of Skin Deep from my friend Max Riffner. It's super nice. HE'S super nice. You should check out his comics.

Maybe I'll start a comic review thing here sometime. Lord knows I need to update this thing more often. Update with actual content.

Oreo Skull Truffle Recipe

My mom taught me how to make these. They might not look like the most perfect things ever, but they are 100% super delicious and super easy to make.

SERIOUSLY IT COULD NOT BE EASIER.



Ingredients
- Package of Oreos
- Package of Cream Cheese
- Package of Almond Bark



Crunch the oreos up like crazy and mix it up with the cream cheese until it's smooth. It doesn't have to be powdered and perfect, but try to get all the big chunks crunched up. Put the bowl in the freezer for about 15 minutes so it can harden up a bit.



Melt the Almond Bark in the Microwave. See I told you this thing is easy.



Make the oreo stuff into a ball and dunk it into the almond bark. Don't be afraid to get messy with this. I know I did. It works best if you have one hand reserved for making oreo balls and one hand for dunking.



Decorate with icing. Or not. They're delicious both ways. I tried to dye the almond bark orange and purple, but the food dye reacted strangely to the food coloring and turned it pastey and gross. SO instead I made skulls. ARE THEY NOT CUTE.

Cute and delicious.

Aviator Gremlin Costume!

I've finished my Halloween costume! I know it's only early September, but this time I actually have a REASON to finish this thing months in advance. I'm going to be spending the Halloween Week in Vancouver, Canada, with my good friend Sfé, and I have to mail the costume up there as early as possible to make sure that it gets there in time (something tells me that airports wouldn't be to keen on letting me bring horns and stuff onto a plane, and I don't want to deal with the hassle of checking a bag (which costs money now), and praying that it doesn't get mega-crushed during flight.) So I will be mailing most of it.

Anyway on to the pictures. I'm calling it an Airplane Gremlin because it kind of looks like some sort of '40s WWII monster of some sort, but I didn't try too hard to stick with the theme. It's actually loosely based on a sketch of a future Skin Deep character I did a few years ago (see above), and I didn't really want to walk around saying "Well I'm a bandersnatch that's half-human and wearing a costume for a fictional band that I've created for a comic that I'm making." ENOUGH TALKING ON WITH THE COSTUME.





These hoof boots were the whole reason I decided to make this costume to begin with. Briana Barber makes these fantastic hoof-boots that I just fell in love with, and I was able to wrangle a discount on a pair by throwing in an art trade and a cameo in Skin Deep for her harpy character. I provided the boots that I found at Goodwill for supercheap and she modded them for me and sent them back. I wanted to make a Halloween costume with them, and that reminded me of the sketch I did previously, since the gal had hooves in that drawing too.

The hooves are surprisingly comfortable, and are more comfortable than most of the high-heeled boots that I own, funny enough.



Click above photo for bigger version (it gets cut off for some reason). I went on the internet and looked around for parts of the costume. My sister Kate had bought me aviator glasses last year for my birthday, so I already had those. I found ram horns for the hat and springbok horns for the fingers off of eBay, I figured I could buy an aviator hat at any old Halloween/Costume Supply store, and I found an outfit from Folkwear.com that I thought would be a cool '40s-looking outfit (Big Sky Riding Pants and the Armistice Blouse).

I knew about Folkwear from my mother, who loves to sew. When I was in High School we made several Folkwear patterns for a couple different occasions (a Chinese Cheongsam for Prom and an Irish cloak that I never ended up using till college for a different Halloween costume), so I asked her how difficult it would be to get the pants and the shirt and make them. Low and behold, we actually already HAD the Big Sky Riding Pants pattern, because apparently I had wanted to make them years earlier but never got around to them.



I made this sketch after picking the materials that I wanted to make the costume out of. My plan was to use a cheap costume aviator hat and cut holes in it for the horns to go through, and to build a wire armature for the claws so I could slip my fingers out of the springbok horns and they wouldn't flop about or drag the arm off under their dangling weight.



The horns arrived from eBay in great shape! They cost relatively little for what they were and the shape they were in, but they were still the most expensive part of the costume (it was about 90 dollars total for 10 springbok horns and two ram horns, plus shipping and handling).

By the time I took these photos I had already started working on the claws. At this point all I did was sew the rabbit pelts (purchased at Hobby Lobby for about 4 dollars) into tubes and sewn the springbok horns onto the ends in a vaguely hand-shaped pattern. Lookin' good! The ram horns were even bigger than I thought they would be!



I used 20 gauge wire that I picked up at walmart and some pliers to make the armature that goes under the pelts and fastens the claws to my arms. It also keeps the claws from putting all of their weight on the rabbit pelt, since I didn't trust the hide or the thread that I used to sew it on to hold a whole lot of weight.

I also used to velcrow at the palm of my hand and on my forearm to kind of tighten the claws onto my own arm. The velcro didn't work as well as I wanted it to, as I had sewn it all wrong for what I needed to do (I used way too much of it), but it works for keeping the claws on.



The horns! I had tried for weeks to find a decent aviator hat but to no avail. I didn't want to get one off the internet because I wanted to make sure it fit right and was made out of material I could easily cut through. After weeks of not being able to find what I was looking for I suddenly came to the realization that I already had a hat that would work for this. It's my winter hat that I had bought at Target several years ago, and it worked just perfect for this. Instead of cutting it up I used the same wire I used for the arms and made a sort of hat that fit on top of the whole thing. The original hat has buttons and clasps that I used to hold the whole wire thing in place.

Also: I bought some Werewolf Fangs cause hell yeah I want giant fangs. Do they not look fantastic? These worked a lot better than the last time I got fake fangs I tell you what.



My wire secrets revealed!

I liked the way the exposed wires looked on the horns so I didn't try to conceal them. I just hope they come off like "I wanted the wires to be there" and not "I was just too lazy to try and cover these up."



The finished product! At the end of the day I didn't want to make the Armistice Shirt because I (read: my mommy hurrr) had already made the pants and I didn't really wan to shell out 15 bucks for a pattern and then more for fabric and time. SO INSTEAD I found this really swell kid's-size bomber jacket that I think works even better than the armistice shirt would have. Plus it was $1.50 at the Salvation army GO THRIFTING YAY. I also used one of the billions of scarves that I own, and plunked on the goggles and COSTUME IS FINISHED.

New Twitter Sidebar

I added my twitter feed to the side on the left over there, so I can go months without updating (oops) and you can still find out what I'm up to.

I have a goal to start getting this thing back up again eventually. I promise!

I'm Still a Lousy Updater

Hey ya'll! I still suck at updating this blog! But I just wanted to plug my fiance's writing blog, which can be found at benfrancka.blogspot.com. While you're at it, you can read his first published story, A Coat of Many Feathers, over at the Red Ink journal, check it out check it out. He uses a character from Skin Deep in it. CAN YOU GUESS WHICH ONE?

Worst updater ever

So I kind of blow at updating this journal. Let's try to keep it together Kory, hmm? The voting on Threadless is over and I got a pretty fair score of 2.8 out of 5. So now it's up to the Threadless Gods to see if my shirt gets printed or not!

I've been chillin' for the past two weeks, takin' a break from my comic and all. I have been doodling though, check out this page of brain explosions.

I wish I could make sketchbook pages that look like this more often. Most of the time they're just ugly pencil drawings that get mushed nearly immediately.

Has anyone ever sold stuff on Amazon.com? I tell you, it is the way to go. I went home last weekend and got all the CDs that had been rotting in a box since I started college five years ago and put them all up for sale. Man it is super easy and you get so much more cash than if you just drop them all off at a CD Warehouse or something. I highly recommend it for anyone who has a bunch of crap they want to get rid of.

It's hard, though, because I am an awful packrat. Someone bought my Magical Mystery Tour CD, and I got it to put into a bag and all the memories I had associated with the album were just screaming "NO DON'T SELL ME." I bought it during the best of my spontaneous road trips I took when I was in High School. We decided to drive to Kansas and it took all day through squirrely backroads to get there. We ended up in an antique mall in Harrisonville, where I bought this album. They had a big double-decker bus advertising a Beatles Tribute Band. I thought it was a neat set of coincidences to be buying the Beatles in a town named Harrison-ville where a Beatles Tribue Band was also performing. We listened to the album through the trip while making up crude lyrics to Penny Lane. It was a good time. I feel a little sad selling the thing, even though I haven't even looked at the CD in five years since I ripped the music to my computer.

Cross fingers that I win!