Don't Forget

6 x A4

Water colour, pen (2011)

I started off doing my coursework, following the theme of relationship between people who are important to me and treasuring time with friends/family, because I feel that people around me play a big role in my life and I wanted to do something important to me for my coursework. I have chosen to present my final work in a calendar format, featuring 6 important people in my life. They are my father, Shiyin, Chermaine, Enning, Lynn and Weiping. I chose to present it in a 2012 calendar as I wanted use it to act as a reminder for myself to spend time and maintain our relationships as relationships need time to foster and are based on what we do together, or how we spend time together. Also, I've always liked making art that is practical and usable in our lives, because I think that makes the art-making process more meaningful.

After that, I moved on to taking photographs of scenes where my friend/father and me are together, spending time and doing something together. I wanted to place these scenes into the calendar as I feel that to maintain relationships with other people, we have to spend time together and at the same time do something together to improve our relationship.

And then I proceeded to drawing these scenes out in pencil, pen and water colour. I chose water colour and my main medium and used pen to enhance the lines of the subject matter in the painting. The reason why I chose water colour was because I thought water colour is smoother, natural and less harsh as compared to other mediums like oil paint, acrylic and colour pencil. I thought the colours of water colour painting would be able to bring out the idea of the scene more. Also, I wanted to explore water colour painting because I was inspired by Dallas Clayton. I saw his works here and seeing his works made me want to try out water colour. Also, Dawn Tan! I found her blog a year ago and have always read her blog since then. I've always liked how she used water colour for her food paintings. You can see my post about her here.

After which, I did around 3/4 compositions for each scene/page of the calendar and started on my final. I painted all the scenes on A4 water colour paper and scanned them in to put it into my calendar template! I had 2 layouts, for the portrait and landscape paintings, you can see them here. I also added in birthdates of these people into the calendar, because we most often spend time with a person during his/her birthday celebrations and I think that birthday celebrations always bring people together. Also, birthdates are more personal and representative of a person.

Throughout the entire coursework process, I was rather slow and I thought I did too little research drawings. I could have drawn more and explored more into the scenes and elements of each painting. But seeing the final work I've came up with, it feels very rewarding and I'm proud of my work because I know I did put in hard work and tried my best to make it my best and final work in Nanyang AEP! There were definitely times when I feel annoyed with my works but at the end, I still try my best because I loved art and loved what I was doing.

Also, I've definitely improved my water colour painting & pen drawing skills! I still like these 2 mediums because I'm able to control them well :-) I think being able to paint is amazing and it is also rather therapeutic? Whenever I paint a particular scene, it makes me think more about the person, and my relationship with him/her. This work is pretty personal because I felt a lot for it when I painted the paintings. Another thing I've gained/learnt through this coursework is the importance of friendship! I am so thankful for my friends, Val, Cher, Sy, Clare, who've helped me through the coursework process, gave me opinions, ideas and motivated me to continue my work. They also helped me a lot with my 8 prep boards on the submission day!!! I was so stressed/nervous/tired I couldn't really think properly then (thanks to Linhui too!)