maureen's art diary

Completed my monochrome still life oil painting yesterday which is my first painting from my Western Painting class in NAFA. Here is a recap of what I've learned and my thoughts.  This is our still life setup. On social media, I always see art students gather around with their easel and drawing the subject from various angles. Being able to be in that situation itself was so fun for me.  We first learned how to mix our own black using burnt umber, alizarin crimson and prussian blue. Not to brag but I think I did really well and I managed to get a black quite quickly, but that's because I did quite a lot of colour theory self-study on my own before I started art school. Then we had to fill our canvas with 50% tone of black...  During this stage I got impatient because the canvas was so big and the brush you see in the photo was the biggest brush I had with me. We used a (small) cloth to achieve a smoother background and again I struggled with it. We were supposed...

Yesterday night, I went for my second class at NAFA (Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts) and left feeling extremely inspired and happy. I posted a story on my Instagram talking about how happy and proud I felt last night, after receiving countless amounts of praises from my art teacher and classmates on my drapery painting. It felt almost surreal when my teacher said he wanted to take a photo of my painting, having everyone gathering around, praising and applauding my artwork.     Me being an overthinker, I started wondering why this could make me that happy and I think it's because with art, I've always felt like I'm not good enough. In fact when I received my first praise of the night, my first response was, ' really? '. #selfdoubt  To be honest that wasn't the first time I'm painting drapery. The first time I attempted drapery was the background of my first oil painting, and as you can see, it's not very good. I really didn't know how to go about painti...

Mandatory, maybe kinda boring, background story of how my art journey begun. Ever since I was young I have always enjoyed doing art. Drawing, painting, any sort of arts & crafts… I had files filled with drawings of cartoon characters, my favourite TV show was Art Attack, and I was forever drawing on my textbooks and school desks. My dad recently asked me, ‘when did my daughter become an artist, a painter?’. I replied, ‘don’t know’. In which he responded, ‘isn’t it since young?’. After I graduated from secondary school, I completed stopped doing any kinds of art apart from drawing on my lecture slides. Until a couple of years back, I read ‘A Return To Love’ by Marianna Williamson. “I think the reason people don’t have hobbies today as much as they did in the past generations, is because we can’t bear to do anything we’re not fabulous at”. – Marianna Williamson. Bro this quote hit me, HARD. I literally can’t find this quote anywhere on the internet so I guess it didn’t impact anyone ...