I didn’t follow the recipe to the letter for the ingredients, but I figured you should be able to put whatever you want in fried rice. For mine I pan-fried ground pork, bits of cabbage, onions, frozen peas/corn/carrots, and added in the mixture of ketchup, cooking wine, and a bit of salt and pepper for flavoring. Then I added leftover rice to the mix, set the finished fried rice aside, and started on the “omu” part of the omurice, by frying two beaten eggs (on medium heat) for each serving.

The trick to making pretty omurice that “looks like the ones in restaurants,” per my awesome cookbook, is to put the fried rice on the eggs when they’re half-cooked through and still a little runny – turn the heat to low if needed – then slide half of the omurice on the plate before flipping the pan over. This was a bit tricky, but since I’m not an experienced cook by any means and I did get the hang of it by the third try, I’d say it’s very doable.

Omurice is one of those ultimate Japanese comfort foods that I’ve always wanted to learn to cook, so this was a fun cooking venture for me. That it got the thumbs-up from my boyfriend and his cousin was an additional plus, even though we were having omurice for dinner instead of breakfast ;D

Damn you, yummy-looking takoyaki! T _T

The site credited for the video is definitely worth checking out too Even though some of the posts made me cringe and others I didn’t dare click/watch… it’s definitely good for laughs! WTF Japan, Seriously!?

And OMG…

Cannot… unsee…

If you’ve visited over the last couple of days you probably noticed me making tweaks and changes here and there – changes will continue until I get the site to 100% (right now it’s about 80% complete). In the meantime I hope you enjoy the redesign – drop a comment or a rating if you do! I have high hopes that all the different functions that Wordpress offers will make the site a lot more interactive and web 2.0-y, while still delivering what crap and I had wanted when we first started the site 3.5 years ago – to own a small spot on the internets where people can find high quality, user-friendly walls.

As to whether or not I’ll be walling again – nothing’s for certain, but redesigning pixel ellipsis has definitely made me want to wall again! I’ve been doing a lot of traveling the past couple of months and won’t be completely settled until near end of the month, so maybe there’ll be something then. Maybe with a capital “M”.

This walkthrough highlights some of the more important/interesting steps I took in Photoshop CS2 to create this Loveless wall. I use Illustrator & Photoshop CS2 so if you’re using a different version of these programs, I can’t guarantee that you’ll see the same tools and options that I do. I’m also going to assume that you’re fairly comfortable with both programs. Anyways, hope you’ll find this helpful in creating your own walls

1. Vector the outlines in Illustrator CS2 + Export to Photoshop CS2
I won’t go into details about how to vector in Illustrator, since that would require its own tutorial and there are lots of good existing tutorials out there (devART is a good place to look). For this wall, I decided I liked the unfinished sketchy look (a.k.a. I got lazy), so I just did a partial vectoring of the original scan’s outlines.

Sadly I’m not as familiar with Illustrator’s many options as I am with Photoshop, so after I finish outlines/base colors I always export the Illustrator file to Photoshop (File > Export… > Save as type Photoshop (*.PSD) > Select Resolution: Medium (150 ppi)*, Options: Write Layers, Preserve Text Editability, Maximum Editability, Anti-alias)
* Selecting Resolution: Screen (72 ppi) will produce a very respectable PSD file as well; the resolution selection basically comes down to what your system can handle. My old laptop would cry if I select Medium; my new computer freezes when I select High. Go for the best of whatever your system can handle.

2. Tweaking base colors
I decided that I wanted a dark background for this wall, so with that in place I started tweaking with the blending options for the color base layers. I lowered the opacity for Ritsuka’s hair/skin color blocks, and set his shirt shading layer to Exclusion: 52% to get that semi-transparent look.
Duplicating layers is a good way to make colors more vibrant, so I duplicated the layer with Ritsuka’s hair/skin color base and set the copy to 51% opacity to make those colors stand out a bit more.

3. The clipping mask is your friend
Most of the cool color gradients you see over the outlines in this wall is made possible because of clipping masks. Clipping masks allow you to color over a shape without going over the boundaries of the shape, and I’ve definitely found the clipping mask to be one of the most useful tools in PS.
To make a clipping mask, create a new layer above the layer you want to mask. Right click on the new layer and select “Create Clipping Mask” in the drop-down. In this case, I created a clipping mask over Ritsuka’s outlines. Now I can color over the outlines with whatever I want!

4. The clipping mask is your friend cont.
I grabbed the standard round brush and picked out a shade of blue, then colored the blue over the outlines in the clipping mask layer. I alternated between the brush and a eraser set at low opacity to create that gradient look. I also created a clipping mask over Ritsuka’s hair base layer, and brushed in a warmer shade of purple to make his hair stand out a bit more.

5. Ctrl+Alt+U is also your friend
Ctrl+Alt+U pulls up the Hue/Saturation menu, and that’s another helpful PS tool that I abuse often as a color tweaker. Here I wanted to adjust the hue of the striped texture in the background. The original stock was blue, but I wanted a warmer tone to contrast with the blues in the outlines. So I changed the hue to an orange shade and tweaked the lighting/saturation a bit to get the effect that I want.

6. Color Overlay
I created a new layer, grabbed the paint bucket, and made a solid purple layer over the whole background to again to create a warmer tone using layer blending options. I set the purple color overlay layer to Hue: 100%. See the difference in the background color here from the thumb in step 4?

7. Blocking out textures
I didn’t want to have a uniform striped-texture going across the whole wall that shows up behind Ritsuka, so I created a layer above the striped texture, eye-dropped the gray background color (with the purple overlay layer hidden!) and then used a brush set at low opacity to color over or “hide” the stripes behind Ritsuka. I rounded out corners using the brush and also blocked out some of the stripes beneath the smoke-swirl outlines because I thought that created an interesting look.

8. Done!
I smacked on my siggie and that’s it for this wall! Hope you enjoyed reading this walkthrough more than I enjoyed writing it (j/k).

So if you’re a cat lover, or even if you’re not a cat lover and just like looking at awfully cute things, you should definitely spend some time with Maru desu~!

(If I ever get a cat, I’d want one that’s just like Maru )