OUGD405 - Typogateux

To begin the planning of our cake, me and Danielle sat down in the studio after uni to discuss ideas and what we should do. I told her about my idea of having the cake mexican themed and we decided to go with that. We would name it Type-gato as a play on words with the brief name Typogateux as 'gato' is spanish for cat.

We researched mexican and spanish themed cakes online and found a variety of strange recipes. We then discovered a really nice looking recipe on the Selfridges website and decided to plan via that.

Here are our design planning sheets:

We went out to Morrisons and found all of the ingredients we needed. However when we got back to mine, we remembered we didn't have a cake tin and so we borrowed a glass dish from Sarah Goldthorpe to cook the top of our cake. After that was done, the next day we went to Morrisons again and bought the next set of ingredients for the base as well as the tin. In total we spent £30.56 on ingredients and the tin.

Neither of us had any experience in baking so we thought it'd be really fun but very difficult too, we were absolutely right. 

To begin we slowly melted the chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of boiling water to create the main flavour of the cake.

We then cut up our slab of butter and put it in the pan along with our muscovado sugar as well as some vanilla extract.

Danielle was in charge of mixing whilst I prepared other aspects of the cake.

The chocolate melted pretty quickly and it was then left on the side to cool down a bit.

The next part of the fundamentals of our cake were to mix the eggs into the mixture, sifting a table spoon of flour in between the eggs to prevent separation and to dry it out a bit.

Next we had to add the cocoa powder, flour and cinnamon to the mixture. Continuously mixing it together.

After that I poured the freshly made chocolate sauce into that pan to give it the strong chocolate flavour.

My next job was to chop the chillies up very finely and then add them to the mix to give it a kick and a more heightened flavour.

That was it, after greasing and dusting the glass dish we poured in the mixture and put it in the oven for an hour.

Whilst the soon-to-be top section of our cake was in the oven I started on the chocolate icing to cover the cake in, to do this I melted the chocolate and cream together in a saucepan very slowly to make sure there were no lumps. I then proceeded to add icing sugar until thick and glossy until it was done.

Danielle was still pretty exhausted from mixing the ingredients so she took a little nap on the counter.

The buttercream filling was fun to do but I had no idea how much butter went into it! We cut up a slab of butter and added the icing sugar to it, this took a lot of beating. After tasting me and Danielle decided to put the remains of the vanilla extract into the mixture to give it a sweeter flavouring.

After the hour was up, we took the cake out of the oven and it looked perfect. We placed a bowl over the top and cut around it to create the top layer shape of our cake.

To remove it, we cut the surrounding edges into fractions to easily remove the middle.

We left it out to cool and then covered the cake in the chocolate icing.

Finally, after completely coating the cake in chocolate, we let it set in the fridge and then went back to it for me to ice the top displaying the word "Gato". I was really happy how it came out.

After that day's work, Danielle went home to rest and I went to bed in preparation for the next day of baking.

That morning I went to Morrisons to invest in a cake tin as well as some extra ingredients to make a second layer of the cake.

We followed what we did the day before to create the same cake and then poured it into the cake tin and put it in the oven for an hour again.

After it came out, we removed the cake from the tin and flipped it upside down so the top was a flat surface.

We then proceeded to ice the cake with the chocolate covering we made the day before and let it set again.

After about half an hour in the fridge, we layered on the buttercream in the centre of the cake on which we were going to place the top layer we made the day before.

We placed the cake on top of the buttercream and then followed more buttercream around the layer with an icing pipette to give it a more finished look.

After spending a good ten minutes sat admiring our cake, we decided to add some finishing touches to the presentation. First, I began carving some pieces of chocolate into the shape of cat's ears which was a lot harder than I thought it'd be.

And then finally, I decorated the top layer of the cake further by outlining the ears with white icing as well as drawing a nose, mouth and whiskers.

After we'd finished we had some last thoughts on presentation for the competition table, we wanted to explain our cake in a decorative manner and came up with the idea of two description cards to compliment the cake. One explaining what the cake was and the other explaining the meaning behind it.

After finishing the cards, printing them and folding them to make them stand up, everything was ready. The next day we ventured out onto the icy pavements and successfully transported the cake to the studio where we laid it out on the table.

 There were some fantastic cakes entered into the competition and it was really enjoyable looking at what everyone else had made and presented.

Sadly we didn't win but there is always next time! Especially after the compliments received from one of the judges.

OUGD405 - Photoshop Induction - Part 2

After the last induction, we were given a shape and were told to take a series of photographs for our next induction. We were also told to select five of our favourites for use within a postcard brief within the session, I highlighted mine in blue. All of my photos were taken in RAW so I opened the last one and saved it as a jpeg file for use in the session.

This is the photo I transformed:

Now I have prepared my photo, I am going to go through the induction and go through what Simon is teaching us. First he told us to open photoshop and then follow through the file tools and select the 'Load files into stack' button.

Then to follow through with the tutorial we were told to select the selection of 'Bean' images as we were going to create an image from a mass amount of photos so that all of the moving parts of the photo would dissapear and we'd only be left with the stationary image.

After selecting all of the files, we were told to select the option of creating a smart object. Then we let it do its job and waited for it to finish. After it was done it was remained as a smart object that we could modify.

After that was done, we went down through the layer tools and clicked the median button, this then merged all of the images together to finish off with an image without any of the moving areas.

One thing we noticed was the fact the clouds had been destroyed in the image and we wanted the nice sky back in the photo. What we did was find a photo we liked of the sky and drag it into the file. I chose this one and laid it over the top of my smart layer.

We were then told to remove the section of that image where the people were. To finish the photo, I rasterised the new photo and then erased the bottom of the image until all that was left of the top photo was the sky.

Next we were going to be taught how to create a contact sheet on photoshop. To do this, you go into automate and select the contact sheet button.

The box that comes up is easy to work with but a bit annoying. First you need to select either the folder of images you want to use or select the images individually.

After those settings have been chosen, photoshop will make the contact sheet for us.

After that was made, we were now aware how to create a contact sheet. Now we were going to learn how to print double sided and about Loss-less and Lossy file formats. a Tiff file is a loss-less file which doesnt loose any detail so is best for prints, but a jpeg is a lossy file which will lose detail when saved.

As you can see in the information of each file, the Tiff file is a lot bigger than the jpeg.

We were told to save an example of each side of a postcard to learn how to print double sided.

To do it you have to open adobe acrobat and then combine the files to a PDF, this is then saved and then opened in preview to make printing easier.

After that is done, the correct settings are then selected and it is ready for print.

Now we have learned all of this objectives of this induction, it was time to create my own postcards.

Here are the range of photos I took for this brief.

I selected two of my photos which contained the theme of photography and then edited them in RAW, this gave me more control on the details of the photographs I was editing.

These were then placed in an A5 postcard canvas on photoshop for further manipulation.

I started with the photo of the camera and started by filtering it through a cut out selection to make it seem quite cartoony.

Then I erased the edges so only the inside of the lens was left in that filter pre-set.

Then finally i added a motion blur to the background of the image.

For my next photo, I chose to follow the route of photography, this would be my chosen theme and i would attempt to create my body of work in postcard format through this.

After cropping down my photo to A5 portrait, I made the lens cap a cut out with the same filter settings as before. As well as my previous I made the background have a motion blur to make the lens cap the focal point.

After i finished with these images, I decided to take some more photos on the subject as the ones I had already taken weren't very relevant to what I wanted to do.

Looking at my new photos, I wasn't too sure if I liked my old ones because of the filters. I decided to discard them as they just looked like I was a kid playing with a basic editing program. Instead I chose 5 photos out of the photos I had taken in total as to what I wanted to use.

I chose a range of three portrait photographs and two landscape photographs to give me a bit of variation.

As I took them all with a DSLR, I wasn't wanting to edit them much because I was so happy with the quality. So instead I decided to develop the idea of circles through them. I wanted them all to work as a set and communicate the idea of circles within photography. Photography is transmitted through a lens (a combination of circular plates made of glass). This is where my idea would rest.

For my first edit, I lowered the saturation then used the circle shape tool to illustrate a pattern down the centre of the image across the lens. After that I used the render filter to create a lens flare to make it more appropriate to the message. Finally I added a texture over the top if it to look quite worn away and erased the top area of saturation.

To follow the series, I did a similar thing to each photo.

Now all of these post cards have been finished I needed to sort out a back for all of them. I decided i wanted all of them to work as the same series so they'd all have the same backing portrait and landscape. Each would contain a pattern consisting of circles as well as type extended the meaning with the visual interpretation.