Haze Long

Recently, I have been setting up the dining area in our house and trying to make it into a studio. We bought a cabinet to store all the knick knacks and KY has been complaining that I visit art supply shops too often. I do have to admit he have some truth there, I did visit an art supply store in his birthday Bali trip.

PC table turned whiteboard

The first thing that I did when we were back from the trip is to convert our dining table to a lightbox. It does sound insane but here we have his old PC table as our white board in our PC room. Oh well.

2 fluorescent lights right under the glass.

That’s his dining table over here, with lights sitting on the metal bars just below the glass. Wow this picture makes it feel like the act is a rape itself. tsk.

Dining table turned lightbox!

I had higher expectations, I thought the whole table will glow. Oh well, this is sufficient.

Perfect for reworking sketches and tracing.

Now I can rework all my poses, sketches and turn them into a better final output with this setup. Quicker and more efficient.

Not sure why watercolor boxes are designed with all these indented cut outs when your tube won't fit anymore once you squeeze them out of shape.

The next thing I tried to fix was this. I hated boxes that house tubes. The indented cuts do not help. Everytime you hold the box slightly angled, the tubes spill out. Its annoying and takes a lot of rubber bands to fix. A permanent fix would be a box to house them.

Romantika at Amcorp Mall

Vinn and I frequent Amcorp Mall lately due to one of our clients’ office is right next to it. We visited this shop a few times and always decided not to buy anything on the way out. The next day, we would regret and yearned for another visit back to this thrift shop.

Vinn is obsessed with places like these, it is like a more affordable version of teddy tales.

This is Vinn. Not me. I detest provencal or vintage style .. too feminine for me. But if you look at the prices, the boxes are very affordable indeed. They have all sorts of decoration/interior solutions.

RM 35 for this size is cheap. Check out the blank ones in art & craft shops, they cost at least 50.

In the end, I bought this box after Vinn convinced me that paying 9 bucks more is worth the good paint and wood compared to the cheaper counterpart. It makes sense, this is very customizable and I get to delete this this.. flowery print.

Matching color to effectively cover the cottage style flower print.

Getting to work is an impulsive decision of mine recently. I try not to think about how long I need to work and when is the exact time I will see the final result. Think less, do more huh.

Once I got the color right, I added more white to the swatch. Acrylic always dries darker.

It is easy to match the color but slightly more challenging to brighten it to compensate for the drying shade of Acrylic paint. It dries comparatively darker and slightly more saturated too.

Painting over the print.

At this point, I was struck by the awesome idea of sanding off the print first before painting over it. Too bad it was already in hindsight when I thought bout this. I had to sacrifice more paint and end up with a thicker cover due to this.

All covered up but a bit uneven.... hmm.

The paint is patchy and uneven due to the brush marks and nature of the fast drying acrylic.

Sanding off all the unevenness..

This called for sanding! Everytime I sand, I think of a more automated solution like a machine and that would mean investing more money that I don’t really want to part with. It took me half an hour to sand it to my expectations of a smooth wood finish.

JW Turner's vignette watercolors are so ethereal...

I am planning to paint something of this sort on the cover, a landscape would be appropriate since I am going to house all my watercolor and gouache tubes in this box. I tried to do this before with the Steve Job’s painting but couldn’t really get the vignette right maybe I can get it this time.

Sketching on the landscape.. that's a lot of details.. stress*

I’ve decided to turn another one of his paintings into a vignette, particularly a painting of Lake Avernus. Another lesson learnt is that color pencils don’t really go well on this surface.

Burnt Umber underpainting to sketch out Lake Avernus

I have been exploring the effects of painting an underpainting first and then finishing with an overpainting recently. I really like this step of the process, it is very calm and relaxing when you are left with just tonal values and all the information of color is taken away. Not sure if you get my gist.

Finished painting.. Messed up the words forgot that ink on sealed wood doesn't really work.

I tried glazing with a medium and learnt another important thing, let the current glaze dry first before doing the next layer! I got itchy hand and wrote the title of the painting at the bottom to balance the composition a bit more. However, the ink behave like it is on a blank CD and came off as easily as it got on. Damn.

Finishing with a wood satin varnish

As I was varnishing the box, I was musing to myself about the importance of placing flora in a painting. Almost every painting has trees, forest or some sort of a plant in it.. most commonly a bunch of carefully arranged flowers. In reality, the greens breathe life into everything and I suppose it is the same in a painting. Flora gives life to the subjects in the painting and therefore, is essential in every piece of art.

Am I thinking too much? I am worried cuz when I read Van Gogh’s letters to his brother, he said ‘I place my work before my life and my sanity. I lost my sanity for the sake of my art.’ He was in asylum then and I am agreeable to the fact that you need to lose your sanity to find something that you have been searching for your entire life.

Dumped all my tubes in!

Finally, the tubes have a nice place to live in. Interesting that the box comes with a mirror. I guess it was intended to be a cosmetic box.

Tada! My satin varnished watercolor box with a landscape painted cover!

After the varnish has dried, it looked like this. It doesn’t photograph very well with varnish on so if you are planning on undertaking projects like these, remember to photograph before it is varnished. However, with varnish your colors are more vibrant and it lasts longer too!

I hope you enjoy my post. I have been thinking bout housing all my artworks in hazelong.com recently instead of another subdomain art.hazelong.com. I have also been thinking about exhibiting my works at a gallery and I always wished for my art to be an adventurous fantasy representation of my life that I can escape to on the backs of a snow leopard and aboard a pirate ship. But what is in my mind now is darkness and images of hell that I have no choice but to paint out first before I can fly.