Classic Wedding (Part 3: The Withered Roses)

(Please be warned that this entry is laden with pictures)

The withered roses - it started off as an experiment, as I love withered flowers so much. Then it became an obsession that was hard to let go, and the next thing I know, I had made aplenty of them. In variety of colours too. +__+

 So, we had the withered roses everywhere during the wedding hehe. I put them on some boxes for the bride’s family...

 

… and made some of the flowers as the corsages & buttonnaires…

 

.. . and some, on the wedding guestbook (one of those rare cases where I made one)

And plastered them on the wedding signage too…

The signage, bearing the groom and the bride’s names, was quilled in Jawi writing (Arabic alphabets being used to spell Malay words and pronounced as such). All quilling strips were hand-painted and hand-cut. Tedious job, but I’m loving the outcome so much I might do it again. ;-)

Classic Wedding (Part 2: Hand Bouquet)

The best part of preparing for our brother's wedding was that I was allowed to experiment with things I've always wanted to do, but didn't really have time to do them. Hee. This time around, I was going crazy over hand-painted papers, so I thought I could give it a try with this wedding.


Remember my first paper bouquet? It was such a mess and took a lot of my time that I almost gave up on doing another. However, with the current trend of handmade bouquet going rounds, I ought to give it a try again, right?

The tutorial for the ranunculus flower can be found here (amazing tutorial with detailed explanation). I made the hydrangea using a tutorial from a Chinese book (which I didn't understand, and relied totally on the pictures). Instead of using the ready-made coloured papers, I prolonged my suffering by hand-cutting and hand-painting my own paper to get the desired colours. Messy techniques.

It took me almost a week to frantically finish everything, but I think I'm quite satisfied with the end result. Yes, it could be improved in terms of durability and colour choice, but for a last-minute work, not bad, right? :P

I'm not sure whether I'd be able to do the bouquet again, since the process was so taxing, and I almost got insomnia from all these.. but again, you'll never know. ;-)

A breath of fresh air

First of all, sorry for the long overdue posts. There's something wrong with the laptop the whole of last week, so I have to rely on the house's desktop to go online. But it was hard to put a blog entry as usual since all my photos are stored in my laptop and I couldn't even reach them. And when the problem finally settled (got my laptop running again yeay!), the Internet went haywire for a couple of days. So all the hustles finally being settled today so I'm back to my usual self! Yeay! You see, I can't live without my laptop and this past week without it felt like a part of me being taken away. Hehe. But at least the lappy got to rest for a week, right!

Let's go back to today's entry.

I've recently sent the frame to its rightful owner, so I'm finally able to post this online. :) This is my 2nd try at calliagraphy, and I thought it was much better than my first try. It looks neat, and has that wood feel to it.

It's very strong and sturdy, even though I just used mounting board and exacto knife for the design. The hardest part was during the measurement process, as calculations always tire me out! Told you I'm not good with numbers!

The process itself wasn't that tedious, but this time I pay more attention on the corners (those are the most difficult parts of the design. I painted everything in few layers of  red poster colour, and let it dry. I later coated it with few layers of mod podge, to seal everything (so it would last longer, and didn't collect much dust). I'm loving mod podge so much now and have been using it on most of my projects :)

And only after everything dried, I pasted the design on a thick white paper and frame it. And I'm loving the final outcome. It looked way better than my first try, right? :)

Fathiah, thank you for giving me the opportunity to explore on calligraphy, and I've enjoyed making this for you!

Expression of Art

I just have to blog about this.

We had a blast in our Art Appreciation class today. Well, the original course name is "Curricular Issues in TESL" but I always prefer to call it Art Appreciation class anyway, because we have the weekly class at an Art Studio, and are taught by an Art Professor (who happens to be very proficient in other field as well). I always look forward for Prof Syukor's class, as the class always starts with a makan-makan session, and it's sooo relaxing to learn in an everchanging surroundings (he changed the drawings every few weeks).

So today, we have our official Art Appreciation Day. It carries marks, and we got to express ourselves through painting, with guidance from Prof Syukor. We are to express ourselves through the Freudian and Jung's conscious and subconscious theories - in other words, expressing our dream through our painting, taking into consideration a symbolic representation of our dream. I had lots and lots of fun painting, even though I know I'm not very good with brushes. But it's a great process of learning and Prof gave a very constructive criticism afterward. We're going to present the artwork in front of class next week, and I really want to share this with you guys...

This is my first ever abstract painting, inspired by strokes by Jackson Pollock (googled his name for clearer explanation).



(this is taken during the process of splashing the colours - look at my hand!)

This is totally an ameteurish work, and I have a lot to learn. For one, I have to learn how to perfecting my strokes, as for now, I don't think I have any stroke hahaha. I need to learn how to play with strokes, as it would personalised my painting. Secondly, Prof said there're still some empty spaces and I have to learn how to fill in the gap. On the good side, he said I expressed a lot of unconscious motives in my painting, and it is very expressive. Which is true. I put so many emotions on it when I splashed the colours that at one point, I nearly cried. Whick is a bit weird. But then, after the whole painting exercise, I felt really tired, and exhausted, but felt free at the same time. I felt like few kilos had been lifted from my shoulders. I should do this more. :)

p/s: More pictures at facebook.

The Art of Painting II

Okay so I have extras of the pattern paper that I made yesterday. So I decided to use it all up and create more cards hehe. So, I managed to do 2 more cards, another gift tag and an altered jam jar to add up to the collection.

Card #3 (adding up to the collection)


Card # 4


Gift tag # 2


And this is the jam jar


.. in which I store my all shapes foam stickers


It's a simple altered art where I just insert the painting paper into the jar (instead of pasting it on the outer side of the jar) to protect the paper. I also covered the pattern paper on the jar lid with transparency for the same reason. And I added the white ribbon so that it would look like part of the whole collection. Well, I made few altered paper clips as well, but I'll reserve that for another entry. ;p

Oh. And my jar still smells like strawberry jam! Yum yum!

The Art of Painting

I was never a good art student back in school. I love arts, I can draw, I'm good at cutting shapes but when it comes to paint, I failed miserably. That's why my art papers were always ranged between a B to C+. Its not that I did not try, I really did. But I guess my hands were not steady enough to paint things.

But I had a blast painting with the my niece and nephews today. And the best part was, I ended up making my very first pattern paper! Ok. So it wasn't as great as other pattern paper, but still, I made it myself so that really made my day! Therefore, am very proud to present to you guys my first ever, hand-made pattern paper... TADAAA...


Not bad, isn't it. Of course, if you click the picture and when you see the real deal, you can actually detect the unerased pencil lines and some very uneven paintings going on hehe. Well, what I really did was I draw my design with pencil (and freehand circle seemed to be the easiest to do) before started to paint using my niece's watercolour. When the painting's dry, I use black pen to redraw the lines. Because the painting itself was a mess, sometimes I had to draw new lines to replace the previous lines (if you understand what I mean!)

So, after finishing the masterpiece, I decided to make new cards based on the drawing. So, I ended up making 2 cards and a gift tag:


Onto the individual cards - the first one (you can click for better view)


This is the 2nd card..


And this is the gift tag (from the leftover card)


Don't they look artistically messy? Or is it messily artistic? :P