In Touch With Our Inner Child Through Books

I love books. Books have always been my comfort and have helped me get through some of life’s difficulties. My genre is all over the place, I can read historical fiction one minute, and switch to a data science book, and ending the day with a children’s book. I am also the kind of reader who leaves stacks of books all over the place, and read multiple books at the same time (just because I can).

Throughout the pandemic, my reading has significantly increased. I go out less and I try to read before I sleep. So far I’ve read 34 books and have had engaging and eye opening conversations with my friends for some of the books. I also started reading the Shadow and Bone trilogy, along with the Six of Crows duology and instantly fell in love with Leigh Bardugo, its author. I watched the Netflix series and had in depth conversations with my friends about the difference between the series and the book. This is also the reason why I love to read, you get unexpected friends. I made new friends just because I love to read, and isn’t that just an amazing way to connect with someone?

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Christmas Crafts

Well hello there! We know it has been a long time. To be honest, we have been swamped with end of year work. We really wanted to make regular bi-weekly posts but it turns out we were a little too ambitious. We also didn’t really want to put too much burden on ourselves since this was supposed to be a fun project, but we do hope we will be more active next year with a schedule that can fit our lives.

Can you believe it’s almost the end of 2020? Like a lot of others, I simply cannot wait for 2021 to roll in. I have been at home for months and while it is boring at times, I convince myself that this is in fact the heroic thing to do during this pandemic. And since this Christmas I will also still be at home, I thought I would look back to some of my Christmas art projects from the years before.

Fascinating Facades as Art Inspiration

For some reasons, I love facades, windows, doors, and rustic walls that have been standing outside against different kinds of weather, passed by generations, and some have probably have seen the most extreme changes. Every time I travel, I like to see these different kinds of facades. Each one is unique and different, though every country has its own signature.

My favourite facades abroad has to be Portugal, Greece, and Singapore. In Portugal, most of the facades are covered with amazing tiles. Of course this fascinated me further since I am also a lover of tiles. A lot of them are bright in colours with the easy sway of laundry hanging flawlessly, creating this perfect picture of every day life. A lot of the facades in the main streets of Portugal are exceptionally beautiful, but hidden in the narrow streets, you too could find beautiful facades. In Porto, you could find some facades covered in what looks like fish scales. A local told me this was probably the house of a fisherman.

Street Art Lover

One of my absolute favourite things about travelling is walking around to search for street arts. I love how casual they seem and yet most of them require exhaustive labour. I have photographed a lot of street arts, from Lisbon to Penang. For each trip, I always try to find out if there are any street arts worth finding. For instance in Penang, they provided a map where you could spot them yourself. This was super fun because I could do it in my own time. In Lisbon, I didn’t need much effort since you could find colourful street arts everywhere. There was however a one popular place, which I took the time to see.

September Freebie

Welcome to the month of September! We thought this cheery wallpaper can sheer your day a little more. Download them now and use them on your phone. Don’t forget to tag Nina’s Instagram @ninaslittlecanvas and use our hashtag #ourlittlecanvas when sharing them!

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Artificial Intelligence and Art

I work in in the field of Computer Science. I mainly play around with data warehouses but these days one can’t help to read and learn a little bit about Artificial Intelligence or AI for short. AI has been making headlines everywhere, I don’t need to give you examples, I am pretty certain that you can think of some examples yourself! This is the era that we live in now, though we don’t have flying cars just yet, we can see how advanced we have become (technology wise at least) compared to 100 years ago. Just a week ago, I was browsing through my Instagram search and saw an Instagram profile of a celebrity robot?!! The robot looks legit, I literally thought there was a new singer I didn’t know about, but NO it was a celebrity robot? Do I call it “it” or “she”? I was baffled to be honest (especially that the robot has waaaayyy more followers than the average human!).

The Best of Art Jog

Art Jog is an annual art show in our home town Yogyakarta. It is an event that attracts many people, including those outside of Yogyakarta. Each year, local artists as well as a few international artists, submit their very best work to be showcased at this prestigious event. The committee of Art Jog changes the theme each year, including the setting, making this extremely attractive to art lovers as well as selfie lovers (unfortunately so). The last two years, I wrote on my social media how I was disappointed with the amount of people using the art works as photo backgrounds. In my opinion, this issue has really downgraded the quality of Art Jog. However, it is still an event that I look forward to each year (I always try to come at an unusual time, hoping it would be a little quieter than usual – it doesn’t always work though). I feel a little sad that this year I won’t be able to go. They did a virtual opening some days ago and there will be a virtual tour available too. Apparently they will also open the gallery and limit visitors. For me personally, I won’t be coming, my health is way more important than coming to see this beloved event. In this post, I thought I would do a round up of my favourite art works from Art Jog 2017-2019.

Art Journaling, Where to Start?

I am a recent player in the world of art journaling. I have been following a few people on Instagram and took an interest in it. I was a little too intimidated at first because a lot of them looks really professional and I was reluctant to dip my feet into it. However the more diverse the people I follow, the more I could see that at the end of the day art journaling is about expressing yourself, it isn’t about how other people view your work or if you should have a constant style (for the sake of the gram, ya know!). Sometimes you want to voice an opinion, other times you want to walk down memory lane, and another time all you want to do is simply stack some papers and glue things!

Our Little Canvas, an Introduction

Allow us to introduce ourselves. We are two sisters, originally from Indonesia. Between the both of us, we have lived in six countries. We love to travel and experience new things. Currently, we live in two different countries, one in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and the other one in Singapore. Our personalities couldn’t be any more different from each other. However, if there is one thing we can agree on is our constant craving to create. We think we inherited this from our parents who are both creative souls (though perhaps in different media) and we’ve been told our grandpa was quite the artist in his day.