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Meat and Feces

Hello, dear reader

This post, like the title announces, is going to be about the difficulty of turning meat into decent and legible vector art without making it look like shit.

The problem is simple: meat, when cooked, turns into a brown colour, that, when accompanied by the salubrious smells of cooked flesh, delights the palette and the sinus. I love meat, in most of its forms, whether it be hamburger, steak or sausage.

Thus imagine my delight at receiving an assignment from StudentSN to create Ramadan (or Ramazan or Radaman) gifts and general decoration for them.*

I, almost at once, set out to fill my belly and my eyes with the sights and flavours of Arab and Turkish dishes which might very well be served up during a Ramadan Iftar. Lamb Chops were consumed, as was kubeba (the singular, meatball-like form of kibbeh), as were various sweets. All perfectly delicious and entirely pleasing to the eye. No pictures, as I generally trust my gastronomical memory to serve me on occasions when I am recreating food. This works very well in the kitchen and I hoped to successfully translate it to graphic design.

However, upon hitting the CS, I found myself confronted with some difficulties. Some of them were brought on by the sheer amount of food I had consumed over the last few days, others were more fundamental in nature.

My main problem was not the sweets (light palette, beige and golden syrup abound in the traditional arab desert), or the veg (multichromatic delight!), but the meats. The problem ran as following;
Meat, when cooked, takes on a colour palette consisting mostly of browns, blacks and the occasional red. This is( except for the red) the same colour palette that one might use when creating an accurate depiction of healthy human feces. This posed problems, especially in the case of kobeba, which is remeniscent in colour as well as shape.


Shit with parsley?

Not only that, but my culinary side, so used to making yummy food with ease and a bit of immagination, suddenly found itself making what can only be termed shoe soles (patent leather Budapester shoes, please, at least leave me that.) in stead of the lamb chops I remembered with such fondness from the meal two nights before.


Budapester Lamb Soles

But after some experimentation, and with some patience and a belly full of Pizza of all things, this problem was solved. To see if it was successful, I suggest you create an account with SSN, or wait for the end of Ramadan, when my NDA on this particular segment ends. It starts tomorrow and goes on for a month.

I wish all of those reading this and affected by it a Ramadan Karim!

* See also this post

Comments

Anonymous said…
your good in playing with words (: your multi talented and it seems you have a gift in writing, art designs and you have changed your title well atleast now it's recognizable c:
caramk said…
The old title was getting… well, old. Plus, even though I still adore blackletter fonts, I realised there must be a whole portion of the world that can either not read them or connect them to the wrong things. Plus I was playing around with some lovely new fonts…

Thanx for the undeserved compliments!

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