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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A trip to the “Future World”

Who misses travelling? I sure do! and with the pandemic still going strong (sadly) it doesn’t seem that travelling will be in our calendar anytime soon. As someone who takes inspiration from travelling, I have recently found myself struggling to create. So, a few weeks ago I decided to take some time off of work to “travel”! I decided to visit the Art Science Museum with a friend of mine. After living here for almost a decade, I surprisingly had never stepped foot inside the lotus shaped building before this trip! Oh and yes, I had only just realised that the Art Science Museum is shaped like a lotus while I sat waiting for my friend! And it all made sense, why it was surrounded by lotus flowers!

Simple Creative Ideas for When Life gets Overwhelming

How crazy is it that it’s been a year (well, depending on where you are of course!) since the pandemic forced countries to go into lockdown. We’re still in the middle of the pandemic, international travels are still pretty much non-existent and many of us have not been able to see our loved ones in person. Although there is hope with vaccines being approved and vaccinations offered in a number of countries, it seems like there is still a long way to go before things can go back to “normal” (what is normal anyway?!). I personally have felt overwhelmed at times, feeling I’ve had enough of this pandemic, wanting to travel and most of all wanting to go home and see my family back home! Sadly, the virus seems to be very insistent on staying with us for a moment longer. I’m sure many are also feeling the same way. I’m here to share with you some ideas that might be able to boost your mood a little. There’s nothing better that a little bit of art and creativity to make you feel better!

Plants and Paints

Hey guys, it’s been a while! I hope you are all doing well in this new year. I know we’ve been pretty silent in here. For me personally, I’ve been struggling to find a balance between my day job and keeping up with my creative side. On top of that, the pandemic has gotten me in all sorts of mood. Being unable to go home and see my family has sometimes made me feel down and hopeless. In trying to keep sane throughout this difficult time I’ve inadvertently discovered a new love – gardening. A close friend of mine actually influenced me to start, she had successfully grown all sorts of edibles inside her apartment and had shared her urban farming journey with me whenever we talked. So, in November I moved into an apartment with a balcony and started my gardening journey. I didn’t realise how much I would love it until I saw seeds I sowed starting to germinate and grow into “real” plants! There’s just something so amazing and humbling watching a single seed turn into a plant, a flower, something you could actually harvest and eat. So, in this post I just wanted to share with you what I’ve been doing in my garden and how that’s become inspiration for me to paint.

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.

Art and Fairytale in Carmel-by-the-Sea

A quaint, fairytale-looking little town by the sea. I fell quite in love with Carmel-by-the-Sea. Carmel-by-the-Sea or Carmel simplified is a small beach city located in Monterey, California. A paradise for artists and art enthusiasts, Carmel is definitely a visit if you are ever visiting California. I’ve always associated the United States with massive metropolitan cities, and was pleasantly surprised when I got a chance to visit Carmel in 2018. You can literally walk the whole of Carmel’s city centre by foot while being enchanted by its fairytale-like cottages and art galleries that surround the city. This pretty little town definitely fueled my creative mind where inspiration was at every corner.

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.

Simple Watercolour Tutorial – Feathers

If you follow me on Instagram, you might have seen me share photos of old paintings I did in my stories last week. I’m moving to a new apartment in about a month time, and so that’s given me the opportunity to do one of my favourite activities — spring cleaning! I actually really like sorting through my things and going through old items, I never know what I’ll find. Sometimes I’ll find gems I forgot I had, other times I find well… trash lol! Anyway… when I was sorting out my things last week, I was pleasantly surprised by old paintings I did about 3-4 years ago that I had forgotten about. Some where really terrible, which made me reflect on how much I’ve learned and progressed in the past few years just by consistently showing up and trying out new styles of painting. Some, however, sparked inspiration in me and made me want to recreate it, such as this painting below of butterflies and feathers. It’s such a fun exercise to do where you get to play around with different colour combinations and watch what watercolour does best — flow! Here, I will take you on a step by step journey on how to paint feathers using watercolour.

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.

The Language of Flowers, an Inspiration

Did you know that in the Victorian era, flowers were used as a way to communicate? Every flower has a meaning, and flowers became a means to convey a certain message. I always knew some flowers had meaning, like how different coloured roses meant different thing. You don’t give a yellow rose to a crush as it’s commonly a sign of loss of affection instead (unless you want to be friend-zoned that is! Haha). However, I had never given much thought of the meaning of other flowers. Not until I stumbled upon Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s novel titled, what other than, “The Language of Flowers”. I had previously obtained this book through a book subscription box two years ago, but only had the time to pick it up and read it recently. I believe the book came to me at the right time, I’m currently obsessed with gardening and flowers has become my favourite object to paint.