Sketching

One of my new year plans this year was to fill up a drawing journal (65 pages) by the end of the year. I thought that if I just kept drawing or painting anything for more than twice a week, something's going to change and I'm excited to find out. It is just two months past and I already have noticed a few changes. I am more comfortable with watercolor and I find myself sketching things I imagined (and not coming from pictures or things I see), like this one below. I'm quite excited to be drawing unreal things. I find it more exciting to make, more unlimiting and fulfilling. I also find that in drawing/painting more frequently, I am discovering more about myself - being more attentive to my thoughts, what attracts me, what doesn't, what images and colors do I vacillate towards and things that means something to me. Illustrating is slowly becoming to be a personal journey.

With the drawing below, I thought it might be interesting to have a villain who has beautiful hair and a heroin with ugly hands, wouldnt it? Although I quite like it as a pencil sketch, I could feel my hands itching to color this so color it I will.

Harbor Walks

As the weather is warming up, I have started taking walks out in the harbor during my lunchbreaks partly to get my mind off work as well as unstrain my bad back. I wondered why I haven't done this before as I work just a block away from it. I miss the warm waters of home and it is of great comfort to be able to sit there in the docks whenever I want to. I enjoyed listening to the water sounds; waves splashing against the docks, the constant creaking of the rubber "shields" that prevent the sides of the boats from scratching, the occassional screech of the seagulls... My father loved yachts. When I was little, he used to pay me 25 cents for each yacht picture I found in the magazine. He would have loved seeing the many yachts here. Being near the waters brings a lot of good memories. I was able to bring my camera today and took pictures. I found the reflections of the boats on the waters mesmerizing and the insides of the boats interesting. I wonder what would life be like if I was living on a yacht? What kind of people own these yachts? What must it feel like to be steering the wheel and seeing nothing around but the wide flat ocean horizon and the most likely chilly wind blowing across my face? It either could be exhilarating or lonely...and I think I wouldn't be able to keep myself from shouting "Land ho!"

Cherry Blossoms

The cherry blossoms are blooming again. I realized that what makes them more stunning is that they come at a time when most of the other trees are either still brown and bare or are evergreens. And then you see these splashes of  pink or white clumps of pregnant flowers brightening up the otherwise dreary landscape. Nature's timing is so amazing. It really feels like watching a performance honed and mastered over thousands of years.
Sometimes I feel guilty taking pictures of it as it goes against the very essence of cherry blossoms which is that of impermanence. Human nature on the other hand, is that of wanting the good things to not change, to take pictures, lest we forget. How ironic...maybe we have not evolved and learned nature's ways yet.

Remembering fun

I know I am having too much of work when I hear myself footnoting my nightime prayers with, " And please God, help me achieve the lowest possible chi-square value tomorrow with a p greater than .05 for non-significance..."  When I am in this state, I think my creative thoughts and peaceful energy slowly leaks out through the pores of my skin. So I need to get back to the "land of limitless imagination" before I get sucked into the abyss of severely constraining logical thoughts. And so I painted myself a picture of the things I love about my weekends, which are tea, tea, coffee, reading a book by the window specially on rainy and cloudy days, playing with Julia, painting, having great conversations with my husband, gardening, pastry snacks and more tea. Then I painted my nails black and stuck a lizard tattoo sticker (from Julia's sticker pile) on my hand to distract my mind from getting lost in work. What fun!

2010 Winter Olympics Now On!

It is such a great time to be in Canada right now! The Vancouver 2010 winter olympics just started and the opening ceremony was spectacular! I love love loved the light plays and the fiddlers in particular. Such incredible artistic talents. (You can find some pictures here.) The deep nationalistic spirit of Canadians is contagious.

Go Canada!

(All pictures below are from Getty images @ the Yahoo site link above).

Gulping knowledge

There is a line in Edith Wharton's short story "The Portrait" which

aptly describes me these days - "He gulped his knowldege standing.."

That's what I'm doing, with all the stuff I need to do at work.

I just love sketching with oil pastels, as in this one below. I love the texture and

the way you could thicken the color and then scratch on them.

The drawing always comes out better than what I expected it to be.

I am beginning to like the color red in trees - see Charles Vess's illustration.

A Printed page

I had thought of starting an art journal the other day, which would contain simple illustrations/sketches with short phrases that go with them, chronicling some of the new things I experience or think about each day as I continue to integrate into this new country (much like scientists would do in their experiments, and yes I do miss my lab experiments. "My pursuit of nature's truth!" I use to say). But when I experimented on scanning a page and typing some words on the image (instead of handwriting them) and then printing it, I was greatly awed by how real the page feels, like it could be an actual page from somebody's book. There is something about seeing (and feeling) a printed page which has your words and artwork in it..like some "power" that makes it feel unreal, official and definite at the same time. I could feel the excitement in having created something tangible! Man is after all a creative being. We are made to create. This small moment of "enlightenment", opened up a door in my mind that made me think now that it really is quite possible that I could create something that might look like a book. Wouldn't that be just wonderful? So now, it's not an art journal I would be making but a book of illustrated reflections or poems or a children's story. It never is too late to start pursuing one's dreams after all..specially if one can print it on a page.

Meat Pies

These days I am learning to cook pies - meat pies. Back home, desserts and sweet foods are for special occasions but chicken, beef, pork and fish were always the order of the day. Pies seem to be a convenient "north american" way of packing meat and vegetables up and having them ready to heat up any time anyone is hungry. It's one of the little neat solutions I find that an often busy mom needs.

 
 
 

Pride and Prejudice

It was by chance that I picked up the Pride and Prejudice dvd (directed by Joe Wright) while buying some stuff at a drugstore. I didn't have any idea about the story nor the fact that it was written by Jane Austin, back then. The photos on the dvd cover just looked nice. It looked like a decent romantic film and I was in the mood for a romantic story specifically of an old English setting where there are a lot of rules and societal codes that fill characters with repressed emotions that had to vent somewhere along the plot causing havoc to all. Yup, that was the story I was in the mood for when I picked it up (not to mention the dvd was on sale). It has since then, become one of my favorite classical films of all time.

I specifically love Joe Wright's interpretation of it because of a lot of things unique to his style. I loved that he emphasized the many breakfasts that the Bennet family have, which made me miss the big family I have back home. I yearn for the comfort and seemingly endless chatter that comes in big families. I liked the many scenes where characters were shot through windows, behind windows or looking through windows. For some reason, this appeals to me. For me it sort of suggests that what we really see in this world is seen through our own "windows" and sometimes, if we so choose, we could separate ourselves from the world around us and can stand behind the security of our walls and just peer through our "windows". The color palette too is quite fresh yet classic and the surrounding scenes evoke a feeling of being transported in time where there were not much distractions and one can spend the whole evening watching the candle burn. Sometimes I long for the old days where simple things were the main event and relationships were nurtured through letters, visits and having tea. Below is a mosaic I made containing some of my favorite images in the movie. They might as well have been imprinted in my mind by now. Almost every scene is a masterpiece in composition. I love the shadows, the lights and the way actors turn their backs to the viewers so as not to really reveal everything. As in real life, one must still keep an air of mystery. I must say that among all these, my favorite shots are those of the faces of the actors showing their facial expressions. I am so taken by the way they stare; their stares could burn, could melt your heart, could fill you with passion and drown you with delight. Sometimes, it makes you regret why time has to move. Why can we not hit the pause button on those moments, where we ourselves were in scenes like these? And as much as we want to picture every detail of those stares now, we can't, because like laughter, those moments are fleeting. And so I contend myself with these, images from a movie so delightfully made.

.

Animation Hybrids

It is fascinating how in our era where high technology gets cheaper everyday and anyone now could own a video camera (if they so wanted to) and can create movies for themselves, new methods of creative expressions are formed. In these two examples (1 and 2), they show what is called "Flip book animation", which combines drawings done on flip book and movement is induced by video recording as one flips through the pages. This third link shows a kind of wall art animation, where drawings are painted on the walls for each segment of the video. Pretty amazing stuff.

Seeing these, begs the question; if you are going to tell your story, in what medium would it be?