Mermaid Art

Jo and I painted mermaids together. She painted the little child while I painted the mum. Painting was given to a lovely lady who loves mermaids too.

A big achievement for me, to have knitted my first doll. Not perfect, and I did it without following a pattern. Was just knit along and see what happens! I'm glad it came out quite well!

@poundthegarlic.blogspot.com 2018

My first painting for the year

The space between time I paint is getting wider and wider...I hardly produce anything nowadays it seems. but nevertheless, I managed to paint something in between preparing CNY food for the family. Am happy that at least, I've so far managed one painting this year. 👀

Acrylic on paper

Traditional Heng Hua mee sua, which I prepared. Lots of hard work, but worth it!

Home made pizza with smoked duck and other ingredients

@poundthegarlic.blogspot.com 2017

Art from Dec.

Charcoal drawing of a wild flower. Another art piece after a long break.  I wish to do more frequent art, but I never have the mental energy to do so after the hectic week. Thankful for a little extra time in December.

Jodie picked a watercolour book at the book sale. As we were on limited budget, she insisted it was a book she really wanted. And true to her word, at home, she immediately got all the tools and said, "Mum today I'm going to learn watercolour using the tutorial in this book."  And she did, she sat for half a day and followed instructions and learnt the art of watercolour. Where there's a will, there's a way. We've learnt, you can pretty much learn anything you want to when theres a real desire.

@poundthegarlic.blogspot.com 2016

.

.

Some recent art

Some recent random art work\

Painting with only three colours. Yellow, Blue and Brown. The 
three shades create quite a spooky effect. Jo thinks this looks like a female
version of SLAPPY!!!

I painted this picture to accompany and inspire Jo to get back to some art work. (watercolour)

Jo's art work. Acrylic.

@poundthegarlic.blogspot.com 2016

More art work

Mine merging batik pieces and acrylic with some broken shells

Jo's a mermaid face t o face with a turtle

Nel's stack of hand made cards

Jo wondering how it feels like to move like a turtle :p

@poundthegarlic.blogspot.com 2016

Some random art from this year so far

Most art here...will be mine and Jo's. Nel doesn't really do art, although she will occasionally doodle and design.

Hand painted an old brown chair. Scraped and polished and painted it. Good as new now. :)

 A wooden bench made by Jo with a little help from her dad and Nel. Mostly done by Jo.

I dreamt a strange dream. Bout old friends...sharing conversation..laughing at their wrinkles, allowing their white hair and wrinkles to blend in with a checkered quilt. Let's hope I age as gracefully as the ladies in my dream did. :)

At the request of Prof Chan, we met up with her and did a few pieces of Batik Collage to help raise funds for the Turtle Conservation Society.

Nel made a card....picture of work in progress.

Jo's of course, always has a mermaid in it.

On a tired day...I decided to try painting a 3D garlic for fun...with watercolour. Not bad for a first try??

Nel tried placing a real garlic on my pencil sketch. Cool effect. :)

Couldn't resist a bit more fun.

@poundthegarlic.blogspot.com 2016

Some random art

 This is still incomplete. We were reviewing what we learnt in  Bali. Balinese Art. 

1)Draw picture, include lots of lines. Outline lines with darker pen.

2) Paint first layer with Chinese Ink. Include shading. Before starting dilute Chinese ink into different levels of black.

3) When done, add some colour (not done yet).

 After a long time of not painting, it was hard getting reacquainted with water colour. First attempt after a long long time. (Painting based on picture of a calendar given my friend.)

 Trying charcoal again after several years...(You can tell....I've not been doing much art.) Well...I was working on this halfway, when I woke the morning, I found that someone had added the picture on the left together with the words! hmmm....:)

@poundthegarlic.blogspot.com 2015

.

Art- Sculpting horse with Paper clay

Happy Cap Goh Mei, and Happy Valentines Day!!

We spent our morning creating fun art which the children really enjoyed. When the kids begged to do art, I thought, it'd be nice to do something about horses, since according to the Lunar Calendar, it is the year of the Horse!

Well upon googling, I stumbled upon the works of Deborah Butterfield, who is famous for her sculptures of horses made out of wood and metal. Since that might prove a little too difficult for us, I thought paper marche and twigs would be nice.

So we googled for a recipe, and found a really great recipe for Paper marche clay meant for sculpting here.  (I'd advice adult supervision if younger children are making the clay as it has contents like wall filler/ putty, and PVA glue, and make sure to wear gloves when making it.)

Based on the recipe, we made our own clay out of tissue paper, wall putty, PVA glue, flour and oil. To add texture, we added sand, twigs, dried grass etc to into our homemade clay.

Our clay all ready!

The children then drew a picture of a horse on their paper, painted the background, then began filling up the horse area with clay.

Nel sculpted her clay with her hand and the back of a brush.

My work in progress

Jo just couldn't work with gloves and decided to work with both hands. She used the blade on a pair scissors to help her get fine lines. (I made sure she washed her hands thoroughly after!)

To finish of the art, we gathered more dried stuff from the garden and decorated the background/horse with it. Our final product.

My completed work.

Nel's. Simple and beautiful..gives me the feeling of a horse on a hill on a windy day.

 Jo's (pic a little blur.)....a flying unicorn of course! :)

 Happy Year of the Horse and may the year be a great one for you!

@poundthegarlic.blogspot.com 2014

.

Jo's Photo Album in Comic Form

Sometime last week, dear hubby pulled out some of Nel's photo albums to look through her baby photos. As they were looking Jo asked "Mum, where are my albums?"  I had to shamefully admit that while I'd diligently compiled 2 albums for Nel, I'd not done any at all for Jo.

Jo's photos are all in digital format, stuck in my hard disk. However, instead of whining about it, that lil girl dashed into her room, locked herself up and began doodling. After disappearing for a while, she came up to me and said "Look mum, my own photo album. I drew them all."  And she said it with such excitement and a big grin. I've to admit, I love her comic form album. Well, I'm bias, she's my child. :)

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.  (ps. I'll be working on a real album for her soon.)

@poundthegarlic.blogspot.com 2013

.

Some books and yarn art.

The girls, especially Nel, have been doing lots of reading. Nel reads a new book every two to three days. She has this habit now where she has to read before sleep. Some books she read this past holiday that were favourites include   The Hobbit , Five Children and It ,The Phoenix and the Carpet,  Star of Light by John, Patricia St,  Folks of the Faraway Tree and  Throwaway Daughter .

Just some very brief random thoughts on books..

 Hobbit- We loved the book and looked forward to the movie. Well we enjoyed the movie too, although we were a little confused at some parts as there were new characters such as the Orc and the 5th wizard. The kids thought the humour with the trolls and a lot of conversation was better in the book.  However, we're looking forward to part 2 of the movie.

Star of Light (Christian Literature)- This book was touching and sometimes moved us to tears. It's basically the story of how Hamid takes a long journey alone with his blind little sister Kinza to bring her to an English nurse who loves and cares for street children. He has to do this in order to protect his sister from their father who plans to sell Kinza to a beggar. Well...I highly recommend this book if you're looking for good Christian literature.

Throwaway Daughter-  is a book about Dong- Mei who is fortunate to be adopted by Canadian parents from an orphanage where her mother left her. She eventually makes a trip to China to look for her birth mother and discover the reason why she was abandoned. For Nel, I guess, it was eye opening reading about China's one child policy, why sons were preferred over daughters and such.

The other books she loved because of the "magical" elements and suspense.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As for Jo, need I mention? Reading more books about mermaids of course. Well...she's added Roald Dahl to the list, mysterious stuff like the Snow Queen, and her latest love, Paddington Bear.  Other than that, we're reading the Secret Garden. Most of the time though, she is drawing, making paper games and puzzles and playing imaginary games.

She made this carriage with wheels and turned her cousins into horses.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We've been also looking at Huichol Yarn Art and symbolism and decided to try making our own yarn art with symbols that are meaningful to us. It will take several weeks to finish a piece of art as we add yarn by yarn to our work (when we get time.) Here's the beginning of our work.

 The above is Nel's. She's been working on it and putting her heart and soul into it. She plans to finish it. It is hard work!

 The above is Jo's. She doesn't plan on finishing it, too tiring it seems. Obviously she did the mice because she loves her mice, Pipsqueak and Lucy. Her mice have been doing very well, but recently Lucy has been sick. Jo's been hand feeding her water daily, giving her extra love. I've warned them that mice don't live long, and I'm already sure she'll cry buckets if Lucy passes on.

 This is my yarn art. It is tiring if you plan on adding lots of details, yet therapeutic doing this. I anticipate finishing it in several weeks.

Yup...lots going on. School work's progressing and I'm back to teaching. Don't know what the rest of the year will be like, but we will trust God in all things.



@poundthegarlic.blogspot.com 2012

.