My Artist's Date : how to make paints from flowers and leaves

Last week was quite a busy week for me. It was full of family activities as well as of creative ones. I attended 2 live workshops and two online art challenges plus I'm practicing watercolor painting!

There are so many things happening in just one week and now I have stories to write on this blog for maybe 2 or 3 weeks :).  Let's begin with my latest Artist's Date. The Date was for a live workshop with a lovely artist who specializes in painting watercolor with organic paints, the ones that made from leaves of plants and trees and flower petals. Her name is Tongkarn Samathakorn and you can look at her beautiful work at Organic Water Color page.

The workshop was hosted by The Museum of Floral Culture in Bangkok where you can learn about plants, flowers and Thai culture related to flowers.

Here are some of beautiful flower displays around the museum.

The class was held in a small cozy little pavilion in the garden. We were introduced to various kinds of flowers and leaves that could be made into watercolor paints. 

You can make pink paint from Bougainvillea,  blue from Butterfly Pea, yellow from Night Jasmine, green from Pandanus leaves, and the list goes on. How to make it is very easy.  Begin by picking the petals off, put them in a mortar, add little bit of hot water and start grinding until you see the color comes out.

This method needs time and patience. The artist has devoted her time in experimenting until she finds the right paints for her paintings and here are her works all done in organic paints.

The artist has a lot of her paintings published in books and magazines but I have to tell you that the original paintings are much much more gorgeous than the printed ones. So happy to have a chance to see them :D

And here is my attempt of organic watercolor painting.

This workshop inspires me to begin my journey of watercolor practice. If you have been following my facebook page, you may have seen some of my paintings already. After some awkward moments in front of water and paints, I think I'm beginning to fall in love with watercolor painting and I will write about this lovely journey here soon :)

Thanks for coming. Hope you have a merry creative day today :)

Hot air balloon : my creative journey

I'm taking Creative Courage e-course again this year. This is the third session I took with Stephanie Levy. Last year I already talked about how much I gained from the class and I think I gain even more from this third session.  In this class, the core idea is still the same, to have courage to be yourself and brave enough to venture into your own creative track.  Stephanie has made it lighter with the addition of summer recipes and photo walks. What makes me think I gain even more is the participation of the fellow students. I have been following conversations in the class facebook group and just discovered that while learning about other people's experiences, I instinctively explore my own inner self too.

One of the interesting topics Stephanie talked in the class is the metaphor of hot air balloon. Being in a creative journey, we need a lot of energy and effort. Hope, love, determination and support from the ones we love are essential fuel to get the balloon fly. But the hot air balloon is not small. It's big, enormous and needs a lot of energy. We have to learn so much about what could get our balloon go up as well as what has held the balloon down. Doubt, fear, criticism are always what we can identify but cannot get rid of completely. They are sandbags that hold down the balloon. I think in this case, it's all about focus. We will be constantly held down with flashes of fear, doubt and inner critic/ people's opinions, no way to avoid that. The trick is how to get ourselves back from those distractions and focus on what we want to focus.

My practice is to check myself. Whenever I feel down, doubtful or hurt, I will ask myself if these feeling are going to get me to my goal. If it's not why do I have to waste my time? There are plenty of things to do in my life plan. Ditch it and get going!

Again, it's easier said than done :P Sometimes I just wonder why some people (like  the old me) love to dwell in sadness rather than try to be happy. No answer to that but when I cannot let bad feelings go immediately, my second method is to imagine the time when I felt joy while making art or even daydream of the day of my success like ; my Etsy sale number gets over 1,000 or my art gets featured on famous blogs or magazines or my name is on a picture book's cover, etc. This may sound silly but it definitely lifts up my spirit and the only way to make those dreams come true is to work hard. So, I work!

Yes, it's only the matter of using focus, persistence and joy of creating as fuel for your hot air balloon of creative journey. Thanks to Stephanie for teaching this valuable lesson.

I hope I can stick with my methods and hope it can be helpful for those who are in this same struggling path :) Thanks for coming. I hope you have a merry day.

A week of weakness and a drawing book

This week has been a week of weakness for me. I have got a cold, not so grave but not well enough to work in full strength. I try not to feel guilty much. There were several previous weeks of productivity with sketchbook full of work sketches, a week of little work progress wouldn't hurt. As my mom always says 'Take it easy, things will come in your way.' I don't quite believe it fully. To have 'things come in my way', I have to create the way first. But then she is right, people won't feel joy in your art if it's created under stress and pressure. Creativity is really a matter of balancing. Too much pressure, your work comes out dry and suffocating. With no pressure at all?, the work will never come out.

So, I try to be productive in such non-productive days. Books are always my best friends. I choose to read something about art just to have a feeling I'm still working, at least on my creativity. How to Draw Anything by Mark Linley is a very pleasant book, easy to follow with beautiful line drawing examples. I like how he adds little stories in the instructions like how he suddenly got chased by an angry sheep while trying to draw a scene. His writing is very friendly and even if you don't care to improve your drawing skill, it's still a good read :)

Thanks for coming, I hope you have had a merry week :)

On Creativity and my artist date

I spent a couple of months ago reading  a lot of children's books, just to reassure that the world still has its naiveté and integrity. Spending too much time on facebook and virtual world especially when there were intense political conflicts going on in Thai social media could make me that pessimistic. But that is in the past, at least in the past of my feeling now that I can put all my focus on work and my future. I come back to be interested in the topic of creativity again. I discover 3 books I think they will have major influence on my life from now on. One book is called 'how not to think', a translation from Japanese book written by a Buddhist monk. The second book I almost finish is Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit. The last one is the famous Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way.

The two latter books focus mainly on how to live your life in creative track. I have just read the first chapter of The Artist's Way in which the author talks about her two tools, Morning Pages and the artist date. When I read about these tools, I immediately saw how these would help me improve my life. Morning Pages is simply writing 3 pages of whatever in your mind when you wake up in the morning (I have already started my pages and may talk about it later) and the artist date is to find a day in week to go out and nourish yourself.


The artist date (I really like how she names it, sounds romantic and cheerful) is the same thing with what Twyla Tharp talks about doing field trip in The Creative Habit. The idea of going out is not a new idea. Everyone knows when you get too stressed, taking a walk is the best way to get out of it. What I am quite excited is the idea of putting 'a date' with 'a goal' on my weekly calendar. The 2 words somehow change my perspective about living. I always felt guilty every time I went out and had no work progress for the day. I didn't try to combine work and life together. Now I learn that I can enjoy a day outside and working at the same time with a sketchbook in hand and work brief in my head. It will be my brainstorming-sketching day. Sketches I do on the day will be continued in the following day at my work desk. I won't waste my time at all, instead I gain both work progress and spiritual healthiness from a good cup of coffee or a nice fresh air outside :D

I have always thought that I'm quite creative. But that is just in term of my art making, I have just realized that I'm not that creative on how to spend my life happily at all. Living creatively will be what I practice from now :)

The photos posted here are my second 'artist date', a small lovely coffee shop in the corner of an art museum in Bangkok. The very first date is going to Bangkok Seashell Museum. You can browse beautiful seashell photos on my instagram :)

Playtime with little nieces

It's a week of babysitting of my little nieces. I'm not good at taking care of children. The only trick I have is to draw. Luckily, my nieces also love making art so we spent time drawing and painting. Drawing on tiny nutshells was fun and it's nice to pretend to be kid again ;)

ps. sorry for the lousy photos, I just took them with my old iphone :P