Post #618882 by tigertail777 on Tue, Dec 27, 2011 8:32 PM

A bit of an update just for you Wendy and Dan. :wink: (and anyone else actually following along)

So I got some time to work a little more on the cereal box parody, it's getting close but not quite there yet. I am finding this one a little harder than I thought because I want to keep the stark graphic design sort of look to it that the original box has, so that means I can't get all "painterly" with all the shading details on a lot of it. The volcano on the original Puffa Puffa Rice box, is deceptively simple, but really quite detailed and ornate in its own way. Some parts of it such as the smoke and eruption have a painterly blending of colors, but most of the volcano itself is starkly elemental in shapes. I decided to go with something that is akin to an old animation cel: the shading is in single non-blended stages on most of it, except for little bits where it has a brushed or airbrushed feel like the smoke, which is exactly how you would do that for an animation cel. Originally I was going to make the pumice rocks coming out of the volcano black, but it didn't look right. After researching a bit I discovered that pumice stone can actually be a variety of colors including a yellowish wheat. I was also going to make the wahine more island authentic with a bit darker skin, but as I started on it I realized that she would have just blended into the volcano background. So I decided to keep her "peachy white", I guess she will be in good company with all the tiki bar matchbooks featuring white wahines I have seen over the years.

On another note: I was dumb and started painting on the flat panel without adding the sides since it is intended to be a deep "no frame" painting with the sides almost as big as the sides of a real cereal box. I found out putting on the sides AFTER is not a good idea. I hid nails OK, except when it is at a certain angle, but one corner part has a small splinter out of the wood (the right bottom corner of the volcano). It's really not very big, but if you look closely it is visible which kind of bothers me.

Here is the progress so far...

From the side showing the depth

Detail of the wahine

I want to paint the sides with all the nutrition information panels and all the authentic stuff from the real box, but am having a very hard time finding any clear pictures of the other parts of the box. All I can seem to find is the front and back. If anyone has some decent pictures of the box sides and box top/bottom I would be grateful if you could share them please.

Christmas went pretty well, we had a nice tree:

But I have been having a problem for several years off and on with a very bad ingrown toenail.I don't have any insurance and could not afford to see a podiatrist, so figured if it was gonna get done I would have to do it. Tonight I could not stand the pain of it any longer and performed some self surgery with an exacto knife and needle nose pliers. Below are my surgical tools, along with circled in red the main "root" I extracted from the toe (there was actually a lot more to the ingrown nail: it had three offshoots of sharp points about the thickness of a needle growing in three directions).

Here is the big bad toe, kinda inflamed. I had to use the exacto to actually "saw" away an entire edge of the toenail, then used needle nosed pliers to yank it out. I had to constantly keep it under running hot water to keep it soft enough to do all this. The pain was pretty intense, so after I was done I had to take some pain killers.

So, with one toe partly "de-clawed" this tiger is going to be hobbling around for a bit (again).