Back Track

I’m back in the good old Kuala Lumpur and has already fell off the A Sketch A Day bandwagon the moment it gets too tough trying to play catch-ups with time. Yeah. Terrible. I blame work. So much of wanting to be good, right? Pfft.

I am trying to get back and make up for lost time but taking a very long and super slow time to do so. Oh well, here’s for hoping that I’ll catch up eventually.

Here’s one. Not a head shot but nothing significant nor it is finished.

Color pencils on paper for day number 20.. I think.

Mixing Elements

Have had this post safely tucked in the draft for good 2 days with just the images and no words. I seriously dont know what to talk about. I am fresh out of idea and have not been on the sketching mode for the whole 3 days. Yeah, I missed 3 days of my ‘A Sketch A Day‘ project just because I’m “busy”. Well in a way, I kinda am. So I’ll do a walk-through of my process for this particular piece instead of disecting the idea behind the piece itself because well… I’m very occupied as I am rushing to finish my part of a tender before I jet off.

Anyway.

A couple of months ago I figured I had time on my hands to finally transfer one of my patterns/doodles that I have been religiously penned on my notebook to a bigger space and I did it. I used black Sharpie on an A3 300gsm grain watercolor paper.

Weeks later, I got a little crafty by adding in gold cut-out collages in the shape of little triangles on the empty space to create some kind of dimension to the gold element as it hits the lights from different angles. I dont know if I explained it right. Oh you should see it in person.

Tadaaa!

The image is a little blurry but just so you know, I’ll be framing this with a 2 inches lacquared black frame.

A Sketch A Day : Day 19

Well, it’s another headshot. But at least it’s not another human.

2012 Sketches

Some of my random sketches I did back in the year of the dragon ( that’s last year if you’re not familiar with the Chinese’s calendar. This year is snake.). Mostly were done using pens and watercolors in a blank A5 sized notebook.  Just thought of sharing it in here as part of showing my progress and maybe a little wishful thinking that I might have grown out of my comfort zone from my very first try to today… even if it is only a little bit.

A Sketch A Day : Day 17 and 18

Day 17 and Day 18 respectively and I’ve slowly putting colors in my sketches. Can you see? I’m starting to put more effort in my little sketch project. Oh well.. one needs to upgrade one’s skill (and I dont know why I called myself ‘one’. It just sounds fancy that way).

I kinda tired doing headshot. Aren’t you tired seeing it as much I am tired doing it? Maybe we’ll try and work on other things soon…..ish. As for now, the only thing that is extremely tired are my eyes and my legs. So I’m going to sleep early. I had one event early this morning (as early as waking up at 5am!) and I need to get myself prepared for another one in Kota Kinabalu next week among other projects that I have to brave through at the office. Yup! I’ll be leaving Cinta Hati at home (It’s going to be my first time leaving him for work purposes and you should see the joy in his eyes when I announced the sad news).

Cisss!

A Sketch A Day : Day 16

Playing with colors and trying on a new challenge. The challenge was to create something for 3 minutes without thinking. Just draw and see what come out of that 3 minutes. I basically had a lot of practice drawing a head shot and have had already acquire a “cari makan” image ( a go-to image that you know by heart ) in my head with just minor changes in the details. But the coloring part was all do and no thoughts. So it ended up like this. Hahaha.

This is fun. Should do more of this challenge in the future.

The Hot and Cold Project

It has been a hot and cold project indeed if you count the times I was super excited to start the project, getting all inspired one second to being a plain whiny-miserable-almost-at-the-brink-of-giving-up the next second (happens the moment it didn’t go the way I thought it would. Usually during the first stage of production. Tsk Tsk. Princess.) and back to being happy (hours after sleeping the misery off) when the colors and everything finally blending it well together. I get easily distracted and overwhelmed by large canvases (It’s the glass-half-empty thing.).

Here are some sneak peeks of me trying to conquer my mountain. Ok, not mountain.. more like a hill. It’s not that huge but enough to filled up my small space at the corner of our bedroom for a whole weekend.

This artwork is part of a house art project I’m working on, but thinking I might as well start a series out of this using the same method and start contacting galleries if they’re interested to showcase my humble works (Awww you’re so hopeful, it’s cute.). We’ll see.

Oil Pastel on 2 pieces of 2.5’x2′ Synthetic mixed Cotton Canvas. The idea came from the paddy hillside topography and the elements of fire and water (hot and cold, geddit?). Thanks to Cinta Hati for getting me hooked on Human Planet. It got me all worked up and inspired by the images shown in there.

Well of course I’m not done yet.

A Sketch A Day : Day 12, 13, 14 and 15

Day 12 – 3 different expressions of a bald girl.

 Day 13 – Cinta hati. I thought of giving it a try, drawing someone that I know personally instead of images of random people. The result turned out quite sucky because I kept over thinking every little detail that I thought I knew by heart. Like the positions of his eyes when he squinted, the rows of his teeth when he smiles and so on. So the line become too thick and it was just messy because I kept erasing and redrawing those lines over and over again. hmm.. Oh well.. better luck next time.

Day 14 – Focusing on hair because I’m bad at it. I dont have that much patience so I always end up halfway. But then again, I should explore other way of drawing hair instead of focusing on every strand. Well, obviously this kind of thing requires experience and I’m still lacking in that department.

Day 15 – More hair, more frustration and a work half done. Spot coffee stains on the paper from my breakfast that I had at the office infront of the PC. Deliberately did that. Thought it added more edge to the sketch. hehehe

This last picture was a request by a friend on Day 15th. Decided to add some watercolours in since I havent touch any in the last couple of months. Even the paper used was from a silver-ish glittery card stock (you can see the sparkles of the paper at the right corner of the image). Wanted to see the effect of pencil on a card stock which made the blending much smoother but the watercolours didn’t really mix well with the card stock. So after some times, the color will fade out and is easily scratched out. I guess due to the shiny and smooth texture of the card stock.

Point is, always coat it with a layer of varnish (or whatever sealer on the market) on all the works done. It is to lock the colors of the artworks in place. Yeah.. Yeah… Only with experience and constant search of knowledge that one would know. hey.. I’m working on it.

It is said that a cost effective color locking technique (or some people called it sealing) is by using a hair spray to coat your work. I dont know about it being cost effective though because my hair spray is expensive! But if you dont have anything else and you happen to have a hair spray laying around (I did!), worth to give it a try. I gave it a try on an artwork that I did using oil pastels on a cotton+ synthetic canvas and it worked just fine. It gives out a matte look as compared to a varnish (shiny) sealer. I dreaded using varnish because it spoils my brushes and I’ve yet to find the best way to clean the varnish out of those effected brushes. So every time I did it, I parted with one brush *sigh* (luckily they were inexpensive brushes). Oh a spray mount works well as a sealer too, but I havent try it so I cant vouch for that.

Life Trade : The supply and demand chains.

Wassily Kandinski- Artists at Work

Found this article on facebook (Oh the perk of social media!) through an acquaintance and I thought I’d share it here. The writer talks about 6 life’s hard truths that we need to acknowledge to be better of whatever we aspire to be. Although he mentioned that being nice often brings one nowhere, I, on the other hand, find that this is an added value that separate you from other beings. So nice is still in but dont just use that as an excuse. His article mainly focuses on giving yourself a skill that would make you valuable to the community, to come up with a trading skill that gives you the higher power in the supply and demand chains.
So I’m sharing this to serve as a reminder for myself to keep on doing what I’m doing right now. Something useful for us to start off the new year with. It’s time we stop figuring things out and just do it.

“…throw enough hours of repetition at it and you can get sort of good at anything.  …. It took me probably 20,000 hours of practice to sand the edges off my sucking.”

So, lets clock in more hours to sand off those rough edges. Ever heard of the 10,000hours-rule theory? It is said that a person requires at least ten years and/or 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve an expert level of performance in any given domain.

It’s worth a try, right? So, Good luck!

There’s no entry of my sketches not because I stop doing it. Trust me, that’s the only thing that I keep doing right now. Every single day. I want to be good and I’m determine. I want to be so good that I cant even stand myself out of envy. haha. Ok, that doesn’t make any sense. But yeah.

So postings for Day 12th to 15th will be next.

A Sketch A Day : Day 11

Source: artissimo.tumblr.com via Ai-Lin on Pinterest

Have you ever had that feeling where you feel so uninspired? Every image that you planned in your head doesnt seems right and the one on paper is worse. So you try to look for some inspiration on the net, hoping something, somewhere will trigger your mood to draw. And when you do (or you think you do), you keep on erasing and erasing and erasing those lines until some small piece of the paper came out. Along the way, you’re hoping if you blackout enough space, it’ll look at least half decent. Damn. That doesnt look good. At. All.

You’re so frustrated with yourself that you are close to tear up the paper infront of you in little pieces and break the pencil in half. You want to be good. You’re desperate of wanting to be good. You keep telling yourself, if you do this enough, you’ll get to be good. But at the end of the day, you know it’ll be best if you just stop yourself and curl up in bed. You’ll get to it when your awesome mood is back.

Oh well.. today, that stupid day happens to be mine. So stupid because I cant stop starring at it and there’ no bed for me to curl up in (I’m in the office, pandai!).

So here’s my sketch of the day (a promise is a promise no matter how the situation is). I’m gonna continue with my actual work and later, force the husband to buy me a nice big scoop of ice cream or a big fat steak.

If this drawing is a real person, I would punch it in the face and scream bloody murder.

The end.

*merajuk dengan pencil*