Amanda Has Moved!!

Amanda's Doodles is officially moved to Amanda Doodles Facebook Page.

Please come visit the new home! :D

Under Construction...

A new blog site is under construction and will be ready by September 5, 2006...

David's Little Blue

David's new baby -- Little Blue Prius! Even though Toyota Berkeley salespeople are a bunch of incompetent morons, Thank Goodness that Little Blue has no resemblance of them.

More than a car, Prius is a giant computer that geeks can spend many happy hours upgrading her and exchange notes with each other on various Internet forum. It's not exaggerating to say that there is a Prius cult out there!

How much does David love his Little Blue? Everyday he has to spend at least half an hour with her, teaching her new tricks or getting to know her. Everynight he reads his Prius manual or Internet forum in bed, forgetting about his Girlfriend #1 next to him. *sigh* Maybe one day when he's finally done with all the possible upgrades, he'll remember his old girlfriend.

Maybe.

Media: technical pen, watercolor.

Half-timbered Turret at Autoire, in Quercy

This one was based on a photo in Eyewitness Travel Guides' "Dordogne & Southwest France." The original photo was only abour 1" x 2", which made it quite difficult to see some of the details and forcd me to use my own imagination on some places.

I drew this one in Moleskine Watercolor Notebook, thinking that I wanted to add watercolor later. After adding all the details on texture and shadow, I'm not so sure about it anymore. It feels "done" to me, and I don't know if watercolor will add more charm to it. I should've stopped drawing when I finished the outline, but I had too much fun and wanted to try out Noh Young Wook's style.

Noh Young Wook, a young Korean, spent over a year travelling around the world when he quit his tiresome and boring architect job. Not having any particular destination in mind, he went from one country to another by feelings. He picked up Spanish on the way, got rubbed in Brazil (lost all 5 sketchbooks among others), got stuck at places more than he liked, got sick plenty of time, got homesick whenever he heard Korean, and got taken advantage of more than he deserved. As the journey continued on, he drew the places he set his foot on. I don't envy his trip (too harsh and too stinky for me), but I hope that one day I'll draw as well as him. His ability of simplifying architecture and adding charm to it is impressive! It must be great for him to draw buildings without his old stiff rulers!

Media: technical pen.

Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Yesterday I spent about 2 hours at Asian Art Museum of San Francisco after picking up my passport. Obviously 2 hours are ridiculously short for such a nice museum, but I got my membership and planned to spend many more happy hours there in the future. After all, my Chinese thinking taught me that I have to get my money's worth. :)

I know the perspective is off and the stone lines make the drawing too busy, but I finally made it -- my first major building drawing. I always love to see (non-architectural) building drawings but have a lot of fear about doing it myself, because they are big and complicated and impossible. Now it doesn't seem so impossible anymore, and that is a great feeling!

Media: technical pen.

David's Dishes - Stewed Lamb Shank 2

Voilà, the colored stewed lamb shank!

Media: watercolor.

David's Dishes - Stewed Lamb Shank

David's super yummy stewed lamb shank dish!

I think I'm outgrown my Moleskine Watercolor Book (5.25" x 8.25") and craving for more real estate, like a lobster looking for a bigger shell. I personally didn't expect that it would happen so soon (still got 24 pages left)! Hard to imagine that 5" x 8" was too scarily big for me not so long ago. This one is done in my self made watercolor book (finally), measured at 7.5" x 10", just barely enough for my dinner setting. :)

Media: pencil, technical pen.

Revisit Domaine Ostertag 2

Here comes the watercolored Domaine Ostertag!

Waterbrush is not suitable for washes as you can see from the above. Well, I continue learning about my tools as it goes.

Media: watercolor.

Revisit Domaine Ostertag

Just like le village de Loix, I redid Domaine Ostertag in the same fashion and was able to place David and Stéphane back to the picture. The proportion is a little off (people and the car are 1/2 size too small), but it's the small price to pay for not laying out everything with pencil first. Personally, I like the liveliness of drawing directly with technical pen. As days go by, hopefully I'll get better on sizing.

Unlike le village de Loix, this one should be all right with watercolor. I'll see how I feel tomorrow.

Media: technical pen.

Revisit Le Village de Loix

I always wanted to redo Le Village de Loix, and now I finally felt comfortable enough to do that. That drawing is not that bad, but I just never like it. One little mistake on top of another, and by the end, it turned out to be something very different from what I had started with. Whenever I looked at it, I could never get over my disappointment.

This time, however, I forgot about pencil and drew le village directly with technical pen. Lines are much cleaner and won't be disturbed by colors. This was the major problem with my last drawing: I had to keep on redo pencil lines, because watercolor pencils kept on removing them. Well, I still have trouble with plants, but one step at a time. :)

After showing it to David and thinking about it some more, I'm not sure if I will color it. It seems to be quite self sufficient and have its own charm.

Media: technical pen.

David's Pasta 1

August is a happy time! Not only we can easily find beautiful, organic tomatoes in local grocery stores and farmer's markets, but also our sweet basil provides us an abundant supply to go with tomatoes.

I love spaghetti, but I especially love spaghetti rigati. When looking at the end of each noodle, you see a square instead of the familiar round. But the shape is not what's so special about it; it's the dented line placed on each side of it. These secretive lines enable each noodle to absorb far more David's delicious sauce than the plain spaghetti, and we just love it!

I probably should've made the opaque white thicker, so it would've resembled Parmesan cheese better. Hmm.

Media: pencil (just for the plate), technical pen, watercolor.

Bored Taiwanese Mailboxes

Not sure how often people use mail boxes these days, but those two looked awfully bored when I took their photo at Xi Men Ting on 7/22/2006.

Once again, I did this in my Moleskine Pocket Plain Book, a lousy choice for watercolor. And once again, I didn't plan to do watercolor when I was drawing those two mailboxes; I just wanted to get rid of the unpleasant feeling left from my chocolate cake drawing. (Have I mentioned that I didn't even like cakes?)

One of the problems with this paper plus waterbrushes is that it's hard to get dark colors. (The other major problem is that it's impossible to have even washes.) These two mailboxes are much too light for their real world counterparts, but because I'm so fond of them, this little technical issue didn't bother me all that much. What can I say? I'm shamelessly biased.

Media: technical pens, watercolor.

Chocolate Cake

I don't know why I drew this one; I don't even like cakes. Because I don't like it, it's impossible to make it look delicious.

This is a book example from Yozo Nakamori's "Yasashi Sketch", one of my many Japanese painting books that I acquired during this trip. The Japanese watercolor style is quite different from the Western one. Besides their colors tend to be softer, lines usually play an important role. Also, the end results usually aren't photo realistic like the Western ones.

Personally I like the Japanese watercolor style more, because it's closer to sketching and more vivid. Most Western watercolor paintings strike me as stiff and unnecessarily realistic, which leave very little room to my imagination.

And, of course, ultimately I'd like to be able to do Chinese brush pen painting. It's very Tao to me. There is no difference between sketching and painting. Each stroke itself has infinite possibilities: Let it be a fish, let it be a tree branch, or let it be a bird. As far as your imagination allows you! But unfortunately, it's also the hardest, IMHO. Forgot who said this, "Practice, practice, practice."

Media: technical pen, watercolor.

Chinese Postcard 2

My first lousy effort of Chinese colored brush painting on rice paper (well, it's actually made of bamboo). It's embarassing, but it serves as a starting point of my Chinese brush painting. My first watercolor painting was embarrassingly bad, too, and you know, there is a first for everything.

Oh, I can list over a dozen of mistakes about this one, but the fundamental problems coming from my unfamiliarity with Chinese brush painting. I thought it was similar to watercolor painting and applied the same techniques. However, that was the source of my grief.

Rice paper absorbs lots of water, so waterbrushes do not work well with it. It's hard to see colors, because rice paper becomes translucent when wet. It's also hard to fix mistakes due to its nature. The wet-in-wet technique on rice paper doesn't quite work the same way as on watercolor paper (plus, I couldn't see colors when it was that wet). Also, the brush I picked up to do the writing was of lousy quality. I know it sounds like an excuse, but I had better luck with my other brushes. I'm still unfamiliar with the difference between my brushes and have to do a lot of trial and error.

Chinese painting is HARD! Gotta work on it more...

Media: technical pen, watercolor, Chinese brush pen.

Chinese Postcard 1

My first try of Japanese style of greeting cards. But because someone was calling "The kitchen needs some cleaning" and "The table needs to be set" at my office door, I finished this painting in a big rush and didn't realize that I made a writing boo-boo until much later. Oh well.

BTW, I made the stamp this afternoon. Not very good, but my name isn't the easiest for stamp making. :( Will have it professionally done next time in Taiwan.

Media: Chinese brush pen.