🎨 art & chai ☕ Issue #4

Painting and drawing bookmarks for an auction! 🖌️🎨🔖

I went back to gouache and watercolor paints, contributed bookmarks for a charity auction and I made donuts! 🎨🔖🍩

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i) Following Samantha Dion Baker’s newsletter

Draw Your World

I learned about a 7-Day Still Life Challenge hosted by Samantha and Ohn Mar Win. I immediately got on board and chose to resume painting with gouache. It was a wonderful experience! I managed to do 5 paintings (I ran out of white paint very quickly LOL). It wasn’t intimidating and something I looked forward to do after finishing up with work. 😊

Two of my personal favorites from the challenge!

My best attempt and it was also day 1 of the challenge! This also ended up getting framed and gifted to a dear friend~ 🎉

I love how the garlic came out here.

You can see the other 3 paintings by supporting me on Ko-fi!

ii) Shortly after, I came across the #PLEINAIRPRIL challenge on Instagram! I had 2 weeks to prepare for it and choose the medium I’d like to do the paintings with. As I’ve been trying to step away from my desk, I did not want to do it digitally. Therefore, watercolors it was! 😊

I even prepared my painting station (finally, a desk for painting away from my work-room) and a new palette with the new paints I had ordered.

Day 1 setup to now. The 2 watercolor books I bought 6+ years ago and my watercolor palette.

Plein Air painting’s important part is going outdoors (ideally, totally fine if you paint from pictures) to paint a scene (I did it once~). As I can’t really do that with work commitments, I’m instead clicking pictures of places and things when I am out of my house, and painting them later. My focus is to paint frequently and to finish a small 30-page watercolor sketchbook. ⌚

Here are some of my paintings so far~

Day 2, a pic I took many months ago~

Another pic from the camera album.

I love how the sky’s gradient came out here. :)

You can view the rest of my paintings on my Ko-fi page!

iii) I’ve submitted 3 exclusive bookmarks for The Bookmark Project 2023! The funds are raised for Katiyo Primary School in rural Zimbabwe. The project started in 2017 and since then they have raised over £40,000. ⭐

My designs for The Bookmark Project charity auction!

You can learn more about the project on their FAQ section and check out the bookmarks for this year on the link below! 🎉

This year, the auction starts on Monday, 8th May at 6pm and ends on Monday, 22nd May at 7pm.

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i) DIWALI IN MY NEW HOME won The Bookfest Award 2023, second place in the Fiction > Children's - Diversity & Multicultural category! 🤩💐

ii) I got to do plein air/urban sketching out in nature! We went to a bird park. The scenery was so beautiful. A couple of people stopped by to look at what I was painting and ask questions. 😊

Some beautiful shots of the park~

And here’s me, live-in-action painting! 😋

My travel-friendly watercolor set up I put together the night before!

iii) I met a friend after many years (a long AF time, really) and made some donuts to celebrate! 🍩🎉 Look at them!

iv) Lastly, I have concluded my 100dayproject for 2023 at 52 days. 😌🍃 I was losing motivation and having more fun painting, which led to me not being able to do either, before I took a step back from the gesture drawing project. I shall share a couple of more spreads from my sketchbook next time! 😊 I’m very happy though I managed to cross the halfway mark this time. 🎉

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See you in May! 💛