One stall was handing out thin, red napkin sized squares of rice paper speckled with gold flecks with the Chinese character for “blessing” brushed on it in black ink. It was beautiful. Strangely, I had fallen in love with the paper the day before. Working at a local printing service, I had guillotined the paper for the stall. The large sheets it came in were cumbersome to cut down and they left my palms stained with dye and the floor littered with gold (not that I minded) but I still thought it was gorgeous – so because the customer who dropped it off explained that it would be at a Hurstville stall – I sought them out. Now I had my own piece to keep!

But the word.. . I suppose it looked – oriental? But I could not read it. It meant nothing. That is, until the girl who handed it to me began to explain it.

The character means “blessing” and though one word, it is made up of four.

In the top right corner are the Chinese characters for “one” and “mouth” – and in the bottom right corner is the character for “rice field” – in other words, food. This, the girl explained, represented how being able to eat was a blessing. But without the character in the left hand side, the word blessing wasn’t  entire. It wasn’t really a blessing.

So what did the character on the left mean? What made a blessing entire? God.

And in a few short seconds meaningless strokes on a paper became something much more…

This post is, I guess, uncharacteristic of what I’ve blogged so far. It is more personal, and unrelated to my art. But I think I’ll do more of this in the future. It will still be about my art, but also my other creative pursuits, and life – if I think something is blog worthy. Because right now, my blog is not really the kind of blog that interests even myself to read!

So consider this my (Chinese) New Year’s Resolution! This blog is will change.

Anyway, here is a small re-cap of what I did do last year (but never posted about)…

A cute, little postcard I did for church to help boost Sunday School attendance.

An oil painting (my first!) I did for a  fundraiser. Sadly, it did not sell. But it was great to finally work with oil paints. I love how rich oil colours are.

I recently took down my old work from my website and put up some paintings that I have done in the last few months. This work is more in the direction I want to be heading artistically.

Here’s to a new direction!

This is a painting I worked on today. I’m not really happy with it. Especially the colour, hence why I’ve desaturated it. BUT . . it was good practice painting, regardless!

This has nothing to do with my work, but I love how the Harbour Bridge just rises out of the end of Lower Fort St when viewed from the Garrison.

At the Reception, the invitation design featured again to mark table numbers.

And on each table, for each guest as a gift from the Bride and Groom were (and what I enjoyed designing/illustrating most for the wedding!)
cook books – a compilation of recipes from selected family and friends.

It even included a recipe for the actual Wedding Cake (which was made by one of the Bride’s friends)! Below is my drawing . . .

And the real thing!

It was a lovely wedding. And a week later I received this too.

Congratulations Arlene and Michael! And thank you again for letting me be a part of your special day!

Time is a scarcity now. Since I last posted, I’ve taken on Full Time work. Alas, it’s in retail and reactions to the news of my job have ranged from “Congratulations!” to “What happened to your dreams? Have you gone soft?”. Well, yes, it’s a detour. But I haven’t gone soft. This is not the end.

It took a while but I finally finished Bobby Chiu’s Digital Painting Class! Above is my final assignment . . a refined version of the previous lesson’s assignment. It’s not perfect (I’ve spent the last forty minutes or so tweaking it) but *sigh* as we were once told at Uni from a guest lecturer (well, I don’t remember his exact words, rather the jist of his advice) – - sometimes you have to let things go even if they’re not perfect and move onto other things. Sometimes it’s not worth obsessing over a detail, it’s better to move on and be refreshed by and learn from new projects.

Or to quote from the movie “Confessions of a Shopaholic” – “Cost and Worth are very different things.”

Anyway, despite this, I’m still happy enough with the end result to submit it.

It’s exciting to have finally finished the course .. it sounds cliche but I have learnt so much from it. I understand now how to see colours as they actually are, paint with different techniques and how to use these collectively to create paintings from scratch. Bobby Chiu has put together a really solid foundation for learning to digitally paint with this course. I very, VERY much recommend this course to anyone thinking about doing it!