Art Process: Mustardy Kitty with a Blue Bunny Beanie

Since I suffered from a creative-block today, I decided to make a tiny gift for my best friend and her guy because it's their anniversary. Yay! Cheers for good relationships!

Hey Kid

Dearest Future Kid,

If ever I decided I'd like to marry your future dad, this will be one of our wedding songs.

This is Greatest Lovers by Luke Sital-Singh. We felt like one of the greatest lovers this world has ever seen, it may be different tomorrow or the next day, who knows. It may sound so cheesy you can actually smell it, but it's true. Laugh with me darling.

I love you kid.

Custom-Painted Kendama II

I got a handful of projects I really have to find time for, one of them was to custom design a kendama. For you darlings who're wondering what a kendama is, let me help you out.

From Wikipedia:

kendama (けん玉, also written as 剣玉 and 拳玉)} is a traditional Japanese toy which consists of a ken (sword) and tama (ball) connected by a string. The ken has three cups and a spike which fits into the hole in the ball. Basic kendama tricks consist of catching the ball in the cups and on the spike, however a huge variety of kendama tricks can be performed by juggling the ball beween the cups, balancing it in various positions on the ken, balancing the ken on the ball and juggling the kendama.

Image from funcheap.com

If you want to see videos of how to do kendama tricks, I would recommend visiting goenKendama's website. Aside from being a cool shop that can cater your kendama fix, they have tutorial videos as well. Click here. 

You can say a kendama is pretty much like the Japanese version of a yoyo. Personally, I like playing with it even if I'm not really that good yet. Some people may think it's a little challenging but learning to do stuff, of course, takes some time.

***

So, yes! I finally got the time to paint a kendama. This is actually my second, the first one was sakura-themed. Now this one, I decided to go with aztec design. Considering the shape of the tama (ball), as much as I can, I avoid painting it with characters. Imagine what Howl would look like painted on a ball, oh poor, bloated Howl. So I stick with patterns, flowers and shapes, anything without a face.

I used hybrid acrylics to paint it and since they dry fast, I wasn't able to take some process photos. Or maybe I was too excited to have forgotten about the camera timer. I only got photos after I was done painting it. 

Here you go, aztec-themed kendama.

It was a really fun activity, finding a decent color scheme was challenging but I really love the result of this 2-day session. Cheers!