Picnic

At a picnic, a hard-boiled Thunder egg for lunch.


Rhodocrosite with sprinkles of Pyrite for a desert part one.
A strawberry white chocolate with some dark chocolate sprinkle from a fancy boutique chocolate shop.
Or a little Japanese sweet at tea ceremony.
My partner said it looks to him like a slice of herb & garlic bread...


Witherite for a second desert.
A slice of New York cheesecake or a coconut tart?

Edible trees

More trees + an island from the obsessive weekend.
Pure Pleasure!

Soul of flowers

On the weekend, I was obsessed.
Obsessed with drawing what looks like trees.




I felt something had popped in my head!
I don't think I ever did drawing like this.


I looked at them today and remembered a poem I saw when I was in primary school year 4.


Please excuse my poor translation.....

Soul of flowers by Misuzu Kaneko

Souls of fallen flowers,
Born every last one,
In Buddha's flower garden

Because flowers are gentle,
When the sun is calling,
They pop open and smile,
Giving sweet nectar to butterflies,
Giving their scent to people

When wind calls "Come",
They still follow it gently,

Even their corpses,
Become a meal in a playhouse

Rachel's Garden II

One suffocatingly hot night Rachel is awaken by the fragrance of catnip.



She follows the fragrance, it leads her to a place that seems familiar to her.
It looks like the garden she once visited in her dream.


She comes across some sort of procession.
It is a procession of supernatural beings and monsters that are unknown to her.





She wonders whether she is awake or merely dreaming. Or maybe she has stepped into someone else's dream.



After the procession has passed, she feels as though she has been left behind.
She feels as though she actually belongs to them.


The world around her turns completely silent.

Shadow theatre

This was a mock-up / practice piece of my artist book called Pocket Garden.

This one didn't get bound so I put it on on a window sill.
It's a shadow theatre or a collage with sky.
It changes its mood constantly. Sometimes it's bright blue, pink, purple.

Rachel's Garden I

Rachel lives in an apartment in the city so she only has a concrete balcony.



She has always been an inside cat.
A human she lives with often moved home but it has almost always been an apartment.



She has no clue as to where she was born, may be her parents were stray but she doesn't remember.
She met the human she lives with now in an animal welfare centre. Maybe that's where she was born.



She once ran away from home but world outside her little apartment was too terrifying.
She had fights with stray cats in neighbourhood but did not enjoy at all. And the cars were too loud and dangerous.
She was found soon enough but did not try going out again.
Only sitting by a window to see what humans are up to, and stupid stray cats who are trying to scare her off behind the window.



She loves the air outside but now only staying on the balcony where she is safe.
At least she can feel the sun and wind. Some pot plants to nibble and play with.
She dreams about one day having her own backyard though, with trees, flowers and veggie patch, sleeping in the sun and running around.



Why does she miss the outside world so much?
After all, maybe she was a wild stray in the past, just cannot remember it.

Nib!!

I bought a pack of Arches 300gsm Hot Press watercolour papers.
It's so perfect for not only watercolour but also line work by nib.

I'd been using Saunders Waterford 300gsm with rough surface since I was a student.
It's great for watercolour and a little bit cheaper than Arches. I love looking at this rough surface catching watercolour wash and then slowly creating bleeding effect by itself.
However I couldn't manage to do a nib drawing on this paper. Nib couldn't move on a rough surface smoothly and I'd end up getting blobs of ink and ruining whole image. (I call it nib's poop)



Now I can do nib endlessly. When I first got my nib, it felt so great I couldn't stop drawing all night.
So smooth!



I can imagine me doing more detailed watercolour work on this paper.
Or maybe I could make artist books!

Good reminder for me of how important it is to choose the right materials.

More detailed images are on my etsy shop

Meringue time

Another collection show-off time...
I have this delicious sugary looking specimen called Aragonite.
Aragonite often looks needle-like and fibrous but this particular one is called flos-ferri (flowers of iron).
This one can look a bit like a coral too.



I might eat it if this was served with my afternoon tea! Vanilla flavoured meringue!

I didn't have any habits of looking at mineral specimens as sweets but one of my favorite authors in Japan does it in her blog. It's all in Japanese but pictures are quite cute.
Since I met her books and blog, I can't help but look at minerals as sweets now.
Always makes me hungry!

Detour

I had another experiment for this print Fungiland yesterday.



First chin-colle was a total mess (see my post on Friday 29 Jan) so I thought I'd give another chance as I knew what I did wrong. I needed to change 2 things, material and method, in order for it to work.

Material: Gampi rice paper was used, way to thin. This time, I bought a sheet of Iwaki, slightly thicker rice paper.
Method: I watered the rice glue down, this made the Gampi wrinkle / shrink. This time, I used rice glue straight from the tube.

The green tube is the rice glue I use. This was my glue in primary school in Japan, so it's really really cheap, less than 300 yen (about $3.5 AUD). I was very surprised to see this glue being sold at $10 here in Australia! Since then I buy this glue as souvenir for myself whenever I go back to Japan.



After I applied a thin layer of the glue, I immediately placed on my damped printmaking paper.
Then I ran it thought the press with 3 layers of blankets.



??? this is the result......... ??? I don't like it...........
In terms of technique, it worked really well but aesthetically I don't think it works.
The colour of rice paper is too different from the printmaking rag paper.
I tried to reason / justify this print in the beginning. I thought I could say things like it's supposed to be retro hence the colour but NO, I realised it does NOT work.....
So I stopped editioning.

At first I felt like all the effort was a waste but well at least I learnt something here - PRINTS THAT ARE SIMPLY PRINTED WORK THE BEST!!!





I think my very first proof (above and the first photo on top) works a lot better.
I'm always taking detour. Things are actually so simple but I make them all complicated.