Sleeping through the Storm

As if heavy rain does not interfere her peace, or rather, tough weather out there makes her even sleepier, Horang showed off her ability of sleeping literally all day, not caring a bit of tornado that hit New York on Saturday. What a blessed little soul.

With her sleeping habit not forgotten yet from hot, sticky summer days,
Horang slept with her two front feet firmly pressing against the cold wall.

Aram's Picture Log Update Notice

Just to keep separate functions of this blog and my tumblr site, Aram's Daily Picture Log will be only updated at http://aramdraws.tumblr.com from now on. This blog will remain as it was, being updated (only occasionally and quite lazily) with personal thoughts, some daily events or special events and more on my art work related issues (which should be updated more frequently!!).

Starting my daily picture log, the best gain is the refound joy of drawing and scribbling on a small sketchbook. For quite a long time, I grew apart from carrying a sketchbook around. I just felt lost when I opened a small sketchbook. But, not any more. I can't put my sketchbook away. :)

Sisters' Survival Kit for Hurricane

Hurricane Irene, which put pretty much the whole city in a quite tense alert passed by. Spent the day yesterday with my sister getting ready for the emergency of losing water and electricity. We did have pretty much everything in hand, we just put them out to the kitchen table to be handy, filled lots of jars and containers with drinking water, cooked some food and stored them in case the gas won’t work.

Fortunately nothing so serious happened around this neighborhood. People started walking around by the late morning with grocery bags in hand. We had the radio on with people talking about the situations around them.

Wind is still very strong and it’s gray out, and of course we missed our usual grocery shopping at Sunday’s farmer’s market, but I think we could use our emergency food for regular meals now. In the meantime, since MTA stopped anyway, and since it’s still unclear when they would be back in service, I’m secretly hoping that I won’t have a transportation to work tomorrow.

Fireworks from Night Bus

Aug.27.2011

One summer night, fireworks I saw from the inside of the bus. The best view of the fireworks that I’ve ever seen. So beautiful without any blockage, felt almost surreal in the darkness of the bus with only a few passengers looking at the fascinating colors bursting into the dark night sky.

Thinking that I should draw this when I get back home, I thought of this old fashioned way that I used to do in the elementary school. Using oil pastel, color with bright colors, cover them with black, and scrape over. Messy, but fun.

Good Girl Mode Horang

Aug.26.2011

Sometimes when I’m awake in the morning, I found Horang at the foot of the bed, sleeping ever so peacefully. I like it when it happens because it doesn’t happen so often. Usual case is that she sleeps right next to my head then she wakes up earlier than I do, and (sometimes quite frantically and impatiently) wake me up. I’m quite persistent too, not to wake up, but Horang never gives up until she gets her breakfast whenever she wants. I know I’m not going to get a peaceful sleep until I walk with her to the kitchen and fill her bowl.

I love the feeling of softness and warmth of Horang when she cuddles right next to me, but especially in summer, I can’t help saying “Good girl!” (only inside) when I see her back of the head still sleeping, at the foot of my bed, which means that I am given one peaceful morning.

Spicy Chicken Sandwich Lunch!

Aug.24.2011

Nothing can beat Zaiya’s Spicy chicken sandwich! Whenever I need to get some food near the museum, I go to Zaiya. I’ve tried other kinds of sandwiches and rice platters, too, just to get some varieties. I just always come back to Spicy chicken sandwich. Moreover, Zaiya serves the Seattle’s Best Coffee which is getting harder and harder to find since a lot of Border’s Bookstores are closing down.

Alessandra joined me and my sister today at lunch. When we sat around the table on the side of the New York Public Library, we found out that all of us were having the same menu- Spicy chicken sandwich! With the salmon color spicy sauce all flooding out, it makes one look pretty messy. But none of us got embarrassed today because all of us were quite messy with the sauce!

Most importantly, it was the beautiful, beautiful weather. Nothing can beat the lunch outside with good people in the beautiful weather (especially if you were staring at the computer screen for hours all morning indoors) !

Gouache paints

While I was ordering more colored pencils online this afternoon, I dragged out a bag of gouache paints I used to use and went through them. Gouache had been one of my primary medium while I was at school, but I grew apart from them after graduation thinking I wouldn’t want to afford expensive paints any more. During 2 years, I didn’t miss them much, but occasionally I did.

Just couple of weeks ago, I came across some works of Cornelis Dusart, dutch painter, and I suddenly had this desire to go back to gouache painting. So here I was, going through old gouache paint tubes and put them in three groups, to keep, to toss, to replace. Thankfully, most of paints were in good shapes despite my horrible treatment they didn’t deserve. Some paints needed to be tossed because they were like bricks inside the tube. Some paints needed to be replaced with new ones because they were like bricks but I needed them for sure.

But on a second thought, I wouldn’t toss any of them.