Recently I painted an iPhone case for Michelle’s birthday. Actually it was Yuki’s gift to her. She managed to find a clear iPhone case that is stiff enough for the paint job. If you are interested in painting your iPhone case, get cases that are reasonably hard. Those cases that are flexible will cause the paint to chip when they flex. This is kinda good, plastic and stiff.
I prepped it with a plastic primer, you can get those at hardware shops. Rust-o-leum is a good brand to start, a light mist of spray is what you are looking for. It creates the sandy texture on the plastic that helps the bonding between plastic and paint. I just use regular acrylic paint for this.
Question : do you think that my art are too morbid? Haha.
I collected a bunch of artworks from the Art Expo 2012 held in Matrade recently for my own references. Is being generous and sharing with you guys. Hehe. Anyway, this post is really really really…. long with lots of photos. So if you are not into art, you can skip this post anytime by putting your mouse over this post, 2 arrows should pop up to the right. Click the down arrow to skip this post.
For those who are looking forward to enjoy the artworks from this year’s exhibition, enjoy!
#artception #pleaseone
KY and I went to the exhibition on the 2nd day, there was a free buffet which I have to distract KY from. Other than that, we were left to our own devices when exploring the art there.
Last year, about 3 or 4 people stopped me from taking photos. This year, only one from an art gallery from Singapore. #justsaying
One of the most expensive paintings there. Going for more than 1 mil. #isthisreallyart Looks like a good piece to hang in a tall airwell.
I took a great deal of photos that day, most of them I zoom out so that I can take their name plaques as well. But there were so many and I lost track of some of the artist names. #dontkillme
But these are the ones without names that are really noteworthy. #imho
Look, I found pyrography art on wood!
Ok this is the last unknown. There were also alot of duplicates from last year that didn’t sell. I skipped all those.
Sculptures Akiko Ogusu
Amalia Kartika
Arie Smit
Oo I love this artist Arie Smit. The colors are so vanGogh and the lines so Japonisme. He mostly does art of Balinese culture.
Arie Smit, love the expressionism influence in colors
Calvin Chua’s new work
His old works were hanging there that day as well. But this massive one is a new one I haven’t encountered before.
Chon Jin Gyu
#fishart
Daniel Ludwig
I love this piece. The mixture of realism and abstract elements are done so seamlessly here.
Dong Jo Lee
Goh Lye Hock, you gotta check out his other works. One of the best local painters.
#imho local artists are very sloppy in their art. Most of them are. Sketch lines showing, overlapping lines and disconnected lines with bad edges. #justsaying but this artist, Goh Lye Hock is the antithesis of sloppiness. If only you can see his artwork up close, it is breathtaking and I would buy this if I have the money.
Haslin Ismail
#itsthetechniquenotthesubject
Hidehito Matsubara
Canvas manipulation turned into art.
Hiroyuki Matsumura in superflat style
Ooo look! A piece by the late Ibrahim Hussein
This is a rare one. There are alot of imitates of Ibrahim Hussein’s artworks that buyers should be aware of. Many people invest in pieces from old artists and the turnover would be very lucrative after the passing of these artists.
Ismail Mat Husein and his trademark batik
Another legendary artist from Malaysia.
Jiang Zhinan
Watercolour paintings inspires me.
Joni Ramlan
Kwon Ji Eun
Kwon JinSoo in #paintbynumbers style -_-
KY took a liking to this, which I pointedly reminded his that it is done like those #paintinnumbers merchandise. Not my cup of tea. Zoom in to see what I mean.
Lee Gil Woo, his work inspired me greatly ever since I laid eyes on it
A clever technique of overlaying punched color papers on top of each other. Reminds me of double exposure photography.
A close up of Lee Gil Woo’s work
A close up of what I mean.
A beautiful oil chinese painting by Lee Man Fong. Textures are incredible.
This was one of the memorable pieces of the exhibition. KY and I stood for a very long time gaping at this piece.
A close up of Lee Man Fong’s art
Lee Yong Woo’s The Bouquet #socryptic
Palette knife work are so expressive and free. I love to just look at them and feel the movements of the knife dancing on the canvas.
Lieu Nguyen and her interesting textures
#guesshowshedidit
Luo
I remember I once showed Ringo my painting and she went “Um, so its a crab-woman with a shell and her hand is a racoon?”
In the same context, um…so its a worm janitor with blue sun glasses?
Okano Masato
Raduan Man
Rei Morimura
Rei Morimura
Rudy M
Satoshi Uchiumi
Soenkom Chansrinual mesmerizing textures
This piece is thought provoking. The artist actually squeeze black acrylic out of a square tube. All these acrylic strands and pile on top of each other again and again to form the shapes. Once they are dried, silver paint is painted on top to give it the shine.
Son Pio
Our own Stephen Menon and his inks
Stephen Menon is one of my favourite artist. I discovered him about a year ago and fell in love with his vibrant and bold paintings in ink.
Suhaimi Fadzir
Takato Yamamoto
Takato Yamamoto
Yeo Eng Peng
Yutaka Okada
Zhang Yu Xi
This painting is bigger than my living room. #ifyoucantmakeitgoodmakeitbig
Close up of Zhang Yu Xi massive painting
The linework is impeccable. Sharp, connected and very clean.
These days are filled with art and music. I am enjoying my job and my life now. Sometimes we have to work at certain events in the middle of town though.
Massive jam outside Gtower
We braved the traffic sometimes to get to our venue and sometimes we don’t always make it in time. Aiks.
Getting ready to paint at G Tower
Vinn and I at G Tower for Kronenbourg’s event launch. If you are planning to have some tshirts painted, Paintlust is the company to look for!
Hard at work
Tshirt markers are easy to use and if you have a painted tshirt at home, you have to iron it before you can wash them. This will set the paint in place.
Vinn working at the booth
Vinn loves to color tshirts and is a perfectionist when it comes to quality.
The working disabled
I was still disabled then and couldn’t walk so I had to attend the event in a wheelchair. Some people thought that we are a disabled association but they couldn’t be more wrong.
Dennis Lau and his tshirt
Mishaps happen sometimes. At this particular event, some of our tshirts were stolen but we managed to repaint the tshirts that were stolen. Who knew that art can be so in demand eh.
KY and I
I don’t have to worry about getting KY an invitation for my events. He is usually invited and just have to show up. Talk about convenience.
Its early but people are coming for their t shirts
Everyone gets a free tshirt, painted and doodled by us.
All our gear and some beer!
At the end of the day, that is what’s left on the table. We are always lucky there is someone that will pass us some beer and food while we work. Helps to be a girl sometimes.
Marianne helping out
Sometimes we get jobs to paint small scale instead. Marianne helps us out for this job.
Working hard
There were 80 over plates to paint but it was fun and we finished on time.
Our Martell plates
That’s all our designs spanning across all ze plates.
Our painted plates
We managed to get the Martell logo printed on the plates by myFlippix too.
Painting plates for Martell
And so it goes on.. soon we will be doing larger scale works. You can always check out what we are up to at paintlust.net.
xPlay is really getting hot!
DJ Malika
Also, don’t forget that xPlay will be at Paragon Club this 19th November 2011 featuring Russia’s best DJ and a whole array of local DJs. Not to mention that she is smoking hot too!
There are plenty of ways to get your FREE VIP ticket. The easiest one is to like the xPax Facebook page.
For Penangites, you can get ready for xPlay at Mois Reece on 26th November and party with the first female DJ to win the DMC World Champion, DJ Noodle.
You can also get free passes by registering at http://on.fb.me/XPLAY11
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.
Something to share with you guys while I am away in Bali.
This is a stop motion video I did to promote art.hazelong.com, stupid right since I can just merge the art.hazelong.com with hazelong.com. That is going to be soon so watch out for it. Anyway, back to the video.. I shot this in 2 days, cuz I slept in between. Next time I will remember to shoot in the morning so that it is continuous.
Anyway, my standard has pretty much sucked ever since I stopped drawing after the freshman days from my uni. This is an exercise to catch up and also to develop a style that is my own. I was expecting to do like 60 drawings to get that but I am happy cuz I found what I want in 20 drawings. I am ready to start a small collection of paintings! Please support and buy omg please.
Few years ago, if i drew like this I would have turn it into garbage. Funny how my perception of art has changed. Now I m aiming more for spontaneity than accuracy in portraying the physical aspects of a subject. More of the feel and the mood that I am going for. Proportion is important but not that important but the process of using ink without any sketches below it and sketching an image out is more appealing to me now.
He is here again!
Anyway, for you guys who are fans of Paul van Dyk you can get to see him at xPlay Future Sound System at Helipad, Sepang International Circuit on 22 October 2011. You can start to get the tickets to this epic event for free by activating Musicube if you are a Celcom broadband customer. That or just reload RM 50 for your xPax or UOX and get a free ticket immediately.
There is also another xPlay event if you are in Kota Kinabalu and this time featuring DJ Shy the first on-air female mixer for America’s Top 40. This event will be in Bed Club, 8th of October so mark your calendars!
Recently, I have made a profound decision to permanently shut off my web development services. The sad thing is, there is a lot of competition in the web design market and clients are usually more or less informed about web technology(or so they think)… leading to a lot of confusion about what is the correct standard for doing things. Paying someone who is just out there for the money RM 4000 and paying a freelancer RM 4000 can get you something entirely different yes, but at the end of the day even you may not know which is better.
I am tired of convincing clients not to spam the world wide web with duplicate content, tired of telling them content is king and tired of telling them its not a ‘press button’ then you get sales kinda shit.
Therefore from now onwards I will only develop for my own creativity and with my own ideas.
Painting on the other hand, is a different animal together. When you paint, you feel zen. Its a meditation kinda thing where you feel at peace which is something I am so in tune with now in my life. I am no longer the crazy girl who needs to drive in the middle of the night up to Genting to code some web application while smoking. Now I play with my 3 cats, I sing before dinner and I paint after dinner before I sleep every night. I guess I no longer feel the need to be cool(to be precise, I do not feel the need to punish myself anymore). *smiles*
Done in 2004 when I was 15 with Corel Painter
When it comes to art.. its a long story.. but most of my current friends do not know that I have already put my 10000 hours in art and left it behind when I graduate, I mean who would think that creating art could put food on the table?
I am most familiar, as you can see with Realism. Simply put, I am a photocopy machine I could tell that there are greens in the lips cuz I am so used to see colors in the opposite of constancy mode. For example, at night under the street light you would see that a white car is still a white car but I would see that the car is yellow and brown though my brain is nagging me that it is white and the light is making it yellow.
Realism, however cannot get an artist sales or anything much other than a few ‘Wow, I thought it was a photo!’. Art needs to be interpreted in an individualistic style and I have embarked on my journey to find my style.
I would love to stick to portraits due to familiarity and explore from then onwards. Internet is a wonderful thing because you get to test if the audience love a particular style or not. For example, the picture above according to KY is very nice but it did not sit very well with the Threadless crowd and I myself felt that it is unfinished.
This painting above, I love the hair and the quality of the lines. I thought to myself, this is it I love this. This should be phenomenal to others. However, it was not the case. Someone asked if she is disemboweled, when I was just depicting a dress with frills. I guess colors are important. Oops. Looks like my art slipped into the horror genre without my intending it.
Then I did what all the daily painters are doing, landscapes.. paintings of still life and of life itself. For those unawares, daily painting is a movement started recently by painters who finish paintings frequently and auction their paintings off everyday via their blog and website. Here you can see me trying desperately to stylize while my hands are fighting to add more realistic detail to each element. It was a vicious fight, and I sometimes wonder if I do manage to stylize my art will I be able to turn back to realism.
Like just a thought, once Picasso went cubism could he still be capable of a realistic piece of art?
And so the efforts continue, the thing I have learnt so far is that if you want your art to be loved you have to spend time on your art. That is a fact.
The more you think about the execution and the more you plan ahead, the more spontaneous your paintings look. Ironic I know but it works. Look at sumi-e paintings(chinese ink), watercolor paintings.. they seem alive with a few carelessly placed brush strokes. It is NOT careless. Neurons probably died while the artist contemplate whether to place a certain dot in that space.
And of cos, I have been trying to sell my art.. thinking that posting it up to ebay would automatically get me sales. -_- How naive. I think a small page as a shop in art.hazelong.com would be sufficient when I have something of value. Ultimately, I hope to have my own exhibition by the end of this year
xPlay at Opera
Btw, if you are interested in the local music scene and you missed the recent xPlay at Opera, Sunway Pyramid then you can look forward to the next xPlay party in Cabana Club, Johor Bahru this Saturday. You could also join xPlay in Bed Club, Kota Kinabalu on the 8th of October too.
It starts at 7pm til late. You can get free passes here.
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.
