Chocolate Sparklers for Guy Fawkes!

It is my birthday on November 5th which means many fireworks and I came up with this recipe last week because I found a whole tonne of popping candy and decided I should make something fun with it :)

You will need:

1 Packet Pretzel sticks - these were £1 from M&S food

1 bar of any kind of chocolate

A few packets of popping candy - I found a pack of 10 in poundland

Melt chocolate slowly in a bowl over a saucepan of water. 

NOM

Take a pretzel stick and coat one end leaving a small section to keep your fingers clean :)

Sprinkle popping candy over the chocolate twisting as you go, do this over a bowl and you can use the excess up afterwards.

Lay the sticks on a piece of foil on a flat surface, I used a baking tray.

Repeat until you run out of chocolate, lick the bowl clean and leave to set, put in the fridge if you want to speed this process up!

Peel the sticks off of the foil carefully and voila! 

These are too yummy I need to make more of them...

Pinterest picks this week :)

Have been asked to do another one of these so I figured I would procrastinate a little more...

This week we had an arts showcase where there were guest lecturers from all sorts of backgrounds. We had Clare Owen and Rob Hodgson come in and talk about their work which was awesome! Its so nice being able to talk to working illustrators about what they are doing!

Clare Owen

Rob Hodgson

Henk Wyniger

Vintage circus pictures

Umbrella tree!

Lily Cole by Tim Walker 

(if you ever have a spare £60 I suggest buying his book "pictures" 

it is so worth it I could look at it for hours!)

Scotch Tape series by Wes Naman

whitefauxtaxidermy.com

Beautiful Blythe doll portraits by Shannon_Taylor on flickr

Natural Rock pools in Turkey-I remember going here when I was very little! 

Nick Meek "Welcome to Yosemite"

Stephen Emerson "Shadow People"

Lots of photos this week! Might start doing themes for this :)

Pinterest is amazing!

So if anyone hasn't yet discovered pinterest, this is me recommending how wonderful it is! I find as an art student, you spend a lot of time collecting folders of images to be printed and stuck into books, it is a fairly lengthy process, and does make you wonder if you are doing a degree in cutting and sticking...

I now use Pinterest to collect together groups of images for various purposes, for ideas, mood boards, favourite artists, things to make etc. And as it saves a description, and links back to the original images, you don't have to wonder where it came from, very useful when you are one of those people who would save files and forget which artist the image was by, always helpful during artist research

You can see mine over here. 

Here are some lovely things I have pinned. 

Illustration by Rob Hodgson

Degas sculpture (which I saw in person at the MET-beautiful!)

Illustration by Julian Callos

Advice To Sink In Slowly poster-Ingunn Dybendal

Paper art by Fideli Sundqvist

Book Cut-Francesca Lowe

Kumi Yamashita shadow art

Jon Toogood tattoo design, Jon is my cousin who works in London, this is the first drawing I saw that made me consider getting a tattoo, until then I had never seen anything I would consider putting on my body! 

Luke Pearson 

Jon Carling

Jay Cover

May do another of these next week, there are too many nice images for me to choose from!