Tools of the trade

I've been asked several times, what materials do I use?

Pencils: I like 3B and 4Bs. Soft and dark, but not too dark. I use Faber-castells to sketch the outlines and Cretacolor Monolith woodless pencils to soften the lines after painting in the picture.

Brushes: For minute details, Daler-Rowney Expression series (the dark green brushes), the smallest I have is a 15/0.
              For regular painting, I love the Daler-Rowney Cryla series (the silver brushes). I have brushes from 2/0 to 5. They're actually meant for acrylic paints but I find that they work nicely for me. Unfortunately they don't last very long. Either that or I'm not using them correctly.

Paint: I've got a range of watercolor paints from student-grade to professional grade:  pebeo (cheap buy from vietnam, and the colours are kind of nice!), van gogh, winsor and newton, daler rowney, Master (cheapo-china brand which goes flaky but has some nice hues and is only $0.70 when on sale), Cotman and Ecoline.

Ink: dip pen and waterproof ink, and Copic 0.03 pen for those beady eyes.

Paper: 300gsm Fabriano and Daler Rowney watercolor paper (as you can tell, Daler-Rowney makes alot of money off me!).

Oh yeah, that's a picture of my messy palette and paint test paper. All paintings that have gone wrong end up as test paper.


It's been a lot of trial and error, and Art Friend has definitely made a substantial profit off me. I have drawerfuls of art materials that I rarely use because they don't work the way I thought they would. Hey, everything looks nice in the brochure!

YELLOW by melt

So here's the challenge. Some dude has bought over several .sg domains and has offered the free use of them up to July to do whatever they like with the domains. Being the typical Singaporean that I am, I love a freebie so I chose http://www.yellow.sg/ and as a personal challenge, will only upload yellow-themed PaintInks. So take a look here

Monday blues

It's only Sunday and I've already got a case of the Monday blues!

(Ok, actually I don't but I was itching to draw this!)

AFCC submission part deux

This came out much better than I expected. I played on the word "leaves" too! This will be submitted for the Asian Festival of Children's Content sketch competition in May. All the entries so far are either in paint or digital format and I thought that this would be something different.

 It's been a  good week with several paintings sold, commissions completed, and more in the queue. And a mantra to myself that I paint neither for fame nor fortune, but because there is joy in it.

First ever self-portrait. Ta dah! I didn't have to worry about the client saying that it didn't look like them this time since I WAS my own client.

Urban

I know. It's corny. The theme was Urban.

One Big Story

This is my submission for afccsketch.Some of the items may be familiar to many, and some less so.The tiny elephant is inspired from Frederic Clement's beautifully written and illustrated book, The Merchant of Marvels, Peddlar of dreams.
                               "I also have a troop of elephants
                                all as small as specks of sand
                                who come trumpeting from time to time
                                 into my teacup."

The potion with the "drink me" label, is from Alice in Wonderland  and is reported to taste of cherry tarts, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast.

The broken sign which reads "Trespasses Will" is Piglet's late grandfather's name, "Trespasses William".

Purple Crayon is Harold's, the Kiss belongs to Peter Pan and the Doorway leads to Aslan's kingdom, Narnia.

Sadly, I wasn't able to draw the hour-lilies from Michael Ende's wonderful book, Momo, which were said to have colours and scents that no words were able to describe.

have a great weekend ahead!