De Serre

So today my mom took me to De Serre------one of our favorite art store to get some supplies for acrylic painting. I kinda ran out of titanium white and lemon yellow so I need some more. I am giving away a painting as a gift for someone so I need enough paint for a medium-size canvas. I bought another box of 18-color acrylic paint by Marie's! Man I never thought I would see that brand here, because it's kinda like a Chinese brand (since 1919)! Most of my water color and gouage are from Marie's and they are pretty good. I wanted to buy a bigger and thinner canvas but then my mom told me to use the thick medium-sized canvas from our house (we had two left) so that we don't need to frame it (if I paint on the thinner one I would need to frame it). So at the end we bought the box of paint and two extra tubes of titanium white and lemon yellow. I was really happy :P

I Got Snow In My Neck

So today I took my mom to this mini art gallery in Richmond. It snowed really hard today so I WAS REALLY COLD AND KINDA WET AS WELL BECAUSE SOME OF THE SNOW GOT INTO MY CLOTHES AND MY NECK WAS LIKE SCREAMING. You know me. I ALWAYS take the bus for trips. But when we got off at Richmond Brighouse we were too lazy to wait for bus 407 so we walked all the way to the gallery instead. The snow was mocking me. But it felt really good to walk on its face. Thank god I wore snow boots from the beginning. So we reached the art gallery. It was really small but it had lots of cool stuff------mostly ceramic artwork. I like their hand-made cards. Especially those funky cat ones. They also displayed some artwork from local high schoolers. Coolala! We stayed at the gallery for approximately 20 minutes and looked at EVERY art pieces. Then it was closing time so we got out. The snow was REALLY, REALLY HEAVY AT THAT TIME BUT I IGNORE ITS MOCKING AND WALKED ON THE STREET LIKE A PROUD PERSON. YES. IT FELT GOOD TO HAVE PRIDE AT YOUR SIDE.

Me Painting

So today I was suppose to create this landscape drawing/painting for my Art class assignment, right? So I did color formation. Okay first I have this black sheet of paper, then I drew a pencil sketch of the lanscape I wanted to include on my painting (by the way I painted with gouage. Woah, did I spell that right------gouage? Anyway it's a pretty weird name). The most important thing about color formation (phrase------me trying to translate this phrase in Chinese into English) is how you organize the colors. I did a warm-colored painting and boy it looked amazing. It looked so abstract yet so funky at the same time. Gosh I wish I had a picture of that painting. Right now it's sitting on Mr. Renk's desk, along with my other painting of abstract trees in Vector style.

Brochure

So today I was working on my socials studies brochure. Jessie and April worked on the slide show thingy. I did the brochure in CorelDraw 12 and used Photoshop occasionally for some pictures. Yep. The brochure thing turned out to be really pretty. But then when I printed it it went wrong. Some of the text got covered up by the pictures for some reason. So I went back and corrected it. But then it stil wouldn't work. So I spent about an hour editing my work and wasted four sheets of paper and a whole lotta ink. Umgsahfausfhuashufashdhasd.........

Clay

Today we did clay in Art class. I have tried clay before, and I liked it very much. During the class we each sculpted a pinch pot------now that's something I have never made before! So I molded the clay into the right shaped, and dug my finger into the center of the clay and made a small tunnel. And then I made the edge of the hole into a flower-shaped thing, while keeping the bottom of the pot nice and smooth. Sometimes the clay would crack, and that was when I need to get a little bit of water to moisturize the clay. At the end my pot kinda looked like a sea anemone. Ha ha ha. Not bad. NOT UNTIL I DROPPED THE WHOLE THING! One side of the pot got flattened. Uh-oh...looks like I have to fix it the next class!

Picture-Siggy

EH! Art!

I must admit that I am a really picky person and I like stuff to go MY WAY. At art, we did sketching from movies again, which bored me out of my mind. I dreaded to do something FUN. For god's sake, we should do something like clay sculptures and other fun projects. Oh wow, now I sound like a really selfish person. I don't know why I am like this. I exceed at art, so that's probably the main reason why I wanted to do something that's at my level------something really cool and really involves some creativity. I love the art projects I did at 4Cats studio, such as acrylic painting of colorful landscape, charcoal sketching on painted canvas and clay sculpture. I just think that they are more enjoyable than just drawing pictures from a movie scene. Even drawing manga chibis and characters are more fun than that! I just hope there will be some FUN projects waiting for us next class! I am totally fed up with this!

To Have Fun With Charcoal

Today at the 4Cats Studio we did a charcoal sketching of ourselves on painted canvas. We painted the canvas brownish yellow so that it would look "aged" and "old ". We are sketch in the Michelangelo style with charcoal. I have never handled charcoal before, so I was really excited to use it. Charcoal is really thin and easy to break, so I was being really careful not to break it. The color is beautiful. It looks better than pencil, and what's more, it is more smudgy so I can create various kind of shadows for my portrait. But then I exhaled and blew away some of the charcoal color on my canvas. Hmm. It was like dust... I was drawing with a stick made out of dark dust-------this was weird. When I had finished my portrait the charcoal sketching looked awesome. It looked so realistic and cool. You may think that I haven't erased a single bit while I was sketching with charcoal, but I did. You see, charcoal is very erasable. That's another cool fact. I love sketching with charcoal.

Clay Work

Every Tuesday I would go to 4Cats Studio and make art projects. It's a very fun class, but there's only two people in the class not including the teacher: Me and another 12 year-old boy, John. Last week we have just finished our Tom Thompson painting, and today we moved on to Michelangelo. Today we did a clay sculpture of a human's upper body. The clay was really mushy and has a rather ugly grayish color. It kinda felt like Play-do, but a little bit harder. I sculpted an old man with a French hat and googly eyes and red peppers for hair. The head was going to fall off when I finished the sculpture, but our teacher Sam helped me to adjust the position of the head. It turned out really cool, and my old man sculpture looked really funny, and that's exactly what I wanted. I also liked John's project, and  I think his is funnier than mine and more creative. However, there's only one thing all the sculptures didn't have except mine------a beard! I added the extra beard because I thought it would make my sculpture look more realistic and aged, and it kinda worked. I really enjoyed this Michelangelo class, but unfortunately, it ended at 7:00. Next time we are going to work on charcoal drawing of our self-portraits, and I can't wait till next week's 4Cats class with Sam and John.

I LOVE PAINTING!

Today I finally got a chance to paint my "unfinished" kitchen still lives. I am still in training stage, so I had to paint according to my model painting. This painting features a pot, a dish of fish, and some veggies and fruits. The background is salmon pink and the tablecloth is part sienna and part snow-white. Last time I only had the time to sketch out the structure of these object, but today I was able to edit them and put gouache paint on them. I started with the background, because they are usually the easiest to paint and they cover a lot of the painting, then I moved on to the pot. The pot was slightly crooked so it took me some time to readjust it.
The color of the pot was hard to mix, too, because I have to be able to make colours which will resemble the steely surface of the pot. The Chinese cabbage wasn't as hard as the pot, but I still had some trouble trying to paint the stems with colors which are good enough to separate them visually from the leaves. I worked on the painting for about four hours, and I was still not finished. I think I will be able to finish it next time and frame it. It sure was lovely to look at, and it makes me very proud of myself.

My Trip to Granville Island

Today my mom and I went to Granville Island to spend the afternoon together. There are lots of cool artifacts and art products there, also with numerous galleries, so we decided to take a tour around the island. We took Canada Line to Olympic Village Station, hopped on the 084 bus and arrived at our destination after three stops. We went in almost every shops on the island, exploring new things as we walked. There was this awesome silk weaving workshop where all the silk products are hand- made. In the shop there was a container full of mulberry leaves and silkworm cocoons. It was odd that the cocoons were green instead of white, but they were still very beautiful. We also visited a canoe workshop, where I chatted with the old artist who owns the shop. There are still many workshops and stores for us to discover, and next time I visit this island, I will find out all the secrets.

Designing is NOT as easy as you think

Arrrrrgh! I am running out of ideas and time! Oh sorry, that's just me, frustrated over a pile of design drafts. Today I have to design and paint a picture for my friend as a gift, and my deadline is this Sunday. My topic is suppose to be flowers, and my mom suggested me to do it in a cartoon combined with vector art style. I have already designed several drafts, but they are just not good enough. It's always the positions of the flowers! Positions of objects are always very important in an artwork, because they affect the way the artwork looks. Right now I am just staring at a blank sheet of paper, waiting for a miracle to happen. Who knows? An idea might pop up any minute from now!