National visual art gallery trip

Unlike usual lecture which we spend our time learning in class, we went for a field trip at the National Visual Art Gallery on 26th of February. There were many different kinds of paintings and sculptures. However, I've found that I love those paintings that brings a doom and sorrow feeling to me.

One of those amazing paintings that really caught my eyes was the After Dawn II by Yusri Sulaiman (2013). It was a painting of an old man in the middle of the sea. The entire drawing was in dark blue colour, including the old man's face. He looks tired and at the same time plaintive. Despite his face which was expressionless, his eyes successfully stirred up my emotions. He looked like he was trying to tell me a story, he was trying to beg me for something. However, after starring at the painting for some time, my attention was eventually, being fully attracted towards the old man's eyes. Unlike the previous feelings, I suddenly felt that the old man's eyes was actually revealing a heavy sense of resentment as if he had been experiencing something really sad and bad in his life. Those experiences must have been really depressing and traumatic that caused his eyes to look that fierce but pitiful.

To reflect this painting on myself, at that period of time, my friends and I were having some conflicts among us. The experience of fighting against each other or even having cold war with one another is actually very saddening and frustrating. However, this kind of incident tends to happen between human beings frequently. As friends are always with each other, sometimes people start to notice some irritating qualities that they didn't see before. Instead of tolerating with each other, people always thinks that only they themselves are doing the right things and therefore, they put up a fight. There are quite a lot of examples which friends are no longer friends with each other after this kind of fights. It is consider quite doubtful for me that, is there any pair or group of friends out there are inseparable throughout their whole lives.    

Despite being inspirational, art also plays a significant role in the medical field. Art therapy is being used broadly in dealing with mental and also physical illness. It provides a different form of communication between patients and therapists. Over the years, there have been a lot of successful cases which patients were being healed by using this therapy. Therefore, I feel that the art stream is very important that should be exposed more in Malaysia. How to expose? To begin with, we must first start from ourselves, we should start telling our friends around us about the amazement of arts. How amazing our lives would be with the existence of ART!

Research on art movement

During lecture, various kinds of art movements were being introduced to us. Every kind of them is so beautiful and breath-taking. However, there are two kinds of art movements that specially captured my eyes, which are the symbolism and cubism.

Symbolism is a late nineteenth century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian, which is originated from poetry and other arts. Symbolism was generally a reaction against naturalism and realism. It possesses an anti-idealistic style which attempts to represent reality in its gritty particularity and to elevate the humble and the ordinary over the ideal. Symbolists strongly believed that art should represent absolute truths that could only be described indirectly. Therefore, symbolists always create their pantings in a very metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing some particular images or objects with symbolic meaning.
   

source

Ferdinand Hodler's The Night (1890) is one of his greatest masterpiece. The theme of this painting is about sleep and the fear of death, but also on the relationship between men and women. All figures in this painting are shadowless, naked and are draped in black sheets. Both the central figure and the man top right are Hodler himself while the female figure seen from the back on lower right is his wife at that time. The terrified man in the middle of this painting with the figure of death placed squarely between his legs clearly showed us the theme of sleep and the fear of death.

source

Gustave Moreau's Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864) was actually painting the confrontation between the Oedipus and the Sphinx, which follows the Greek story quite literally. Homage is paid to the Sphinx by showing her thrown of victory and trophies of her dead victims around her. The exaltation of the glory of man is also shown by the Oedipus, who is standing firmly on the ground in the face of fear and danger. However, this painting was actually meant to symbol the struggle between soul and matter. Moreau remarked that the sphinx's head and wings seemed to promise the ideal but her body, being material and female was vile and a trap.  

Cubism is an avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and scrulpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture that was originated in early twentieth century. In cubists' artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and resembled in an abstracted form. In other words, instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. 

source

Pablo Picasso's The Weeping Women (1937) was created when Picasso saw a woman weeping as she holds her dead son in her arms. He wasn't painting this woman to show the Spanish was but in fact, he drawed it to show a picture of the lady suffering from different views to show her heart felt pain. However, the main point of this depressing picture was to show the consequences of wars. 

source

Stephanie Clair's Lovers at sunset is a painting which is more modern compared to the other paintings above. Being influenced by Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Modigliani and Kandinsky, Clair's painting tend to be in bright colours, dreamy people and are from cubist perspectives. This painting captured the special moments in our lives, which we spend with our partner. This painting fully portrays the feeling of love, romance and intimacy. 

Tutorial exercise 22 February 2013

Based on the photoshop tutorial which was being uploaded onto e-learning, we learnt how to create some cute characters by using photoshop.
It became more than just amazing when we can even create characters such as the Twitter style Bird Mascot that we see almost every day by using these skills!
After browsing through the choices we were given, I'd decided to create a gang of vector ninjas. It is a form of creation that can be done by using just the basic shapes and variety of simple tools.
For the first few steps, I used some simple shape tools to create my first vertor ninja character.

I coloured it in grey.

After that, I added some outter stokes and inner strokes. As the reference given was too brief, some specific steps were not given clearly, therefore, I spent quite some time finding ways to create the same effects from the reference. 

Later on, I also created vector ninja characters with different moves and gestures. 

However, I believe no ninjas would feel complete without their combat accessories. 

Of course, painting the background is always important. As ninjas are always active in the dark, I'd decided to paint my background by using some dark colours.

And...Taaadahhhh!

So, the work below is my final creation of vector ninja characters.

Tutorial exercise 8 February 2013

Today's tutorial was about how to paint in photoshop. As what we have learnt previously, we were just being asked to use the brush tool, smudge tool, and eraser tool to paint a horse. It was really hard at the beginning as the colours just would not smudge. However, after trying for some times, I managed to control my mouse and skills better. After that, the next challenge was to paint the horse's hair. It was almost impossible for me as to be honest, I had totally no idea about how to paint the hair to make it realistic. Therefore, I searched a few videos from Youtube and follow the instructions in the video. Fortunately, I was able to paint the horse as well as the horse's hair well. 

Awesome world with colours.

Our world is full of various colours. The existence of colours enables us to live a colourful life. Everything in the whole wide world are being constructed from colours. Starting from the landscape, the traffic lights, to our clothes, cosmetics that we put up on our face, contact lenses, we are all being surrounded by colours. As the title name of my blog, I personally feel awesome and grateful living in this colourful world because with colours, everything and every incidents in our lives naturally become very interesting. Over the past few years, I had quite a number of favourite colours in different period of time. However, the colour that I like the most recently would be PURPLE.

source

Purple cauliflower
source

source

The colour purple is a range of hues of colour happening between red and blue. After doing some research on the Internet, unlike what I thought, I discovered that colours such as Lavender, Violet, Magenta, and Indigo are all shades of purple. There are so many of them that I thought I would go blind in the process of differentiating different shades of purple in the photos I found from the Internet.

Below are some different shades of purple I have found:

Light purple
source

Bright lavender purple
source

Medium purple
source

Plum purple
source

Violet
source

Deep purple (Creamy eyeshadow makeup)
source
To me, purple represents sense of royal and grandeur. One would simply look good if dressed in purple. It is also a colour that always brings a sense of mystery which eventually evokes one's curiosity to explore what are the stories behind it. Sometimes when I look at this colour, I can feel that I am being isolated from this busy world, and immersed into my own thought, my own world. At that time, everything around me is not that important anymore, it would be all about me and myself. It is definitely a deep and rich colour which conceals a lot of stories and meanings as compared to other colours. 

However, when it comes to bright and sharp shades of purple, it always catches my attention and usually makes me feel fresh and energetic, sometimes, it even makes me feel excited. Below is an example of bright and sharp shades of purple:    

   

source

When the bright and sharp purple is being applied to human's hair, it makes one feel that they are so unique and confident. When looking at the model's hair, it make me feel that she's daring, young and is a person with special, attractive personality.

source

Lastly, the shades of purple in the picture above brings a enchanted and mysterious feeling to me. It makes me feel like I am in the forest in the fairy tales stories. It looks so mysterious and at the same time, attractive that it boosts up my curiosity about what is inside the forest and what would one encounter if they are inside this forest.