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.

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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.

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!