Day One
This is a pencil from Lindy’s childhood. What special about it is the unique shape, and instead of regular hexagon, it is triangle-shaped. I used white card board which happens to be the same colour of her pencil. For the head of the pencil, I cut card board in small slices and used tape to make the shape smoother with drawing the – with sharpie.
Day Two
With the portraits, I decided to go completely different on each ones.
The first one I did was a traditional pencil sketching with emphasising on the part of Lindy’s eyes and lips. I tried to soften the lines and blur the contrast for she is a gentle and person.
The second one I did what the extended emphasis on her eyes and lips. I detailed the part of her eyes and used only inaccurate curves for her lips and forehead to create an unbalanced balance and adding some contrast with the usage of pen.
The third one I did was the same angle as the previous one but I decided to go with half-blind contour drawing twisting the proportion of the face while using sharpie to emphasise this interesting unrealistic figure. I like how her eyes are always seemed smiley so I enlarged that part coming out from the edge of her face.
The fourth one was with colour and I rarely did colour in the past. And I went along with the idea of the eyes. I chose warm colours for the background both for matching her hair colour and how her personality being. Instead of going realistic about details, I chose to do something abstract.
The last one I did was her profile with simple lines. I focused on her forehead this time for she has unique forehead shape. And after I finished outlining details, I decided to cut several parts that have strong light to add more dimension to the piece and also to do something I have never tried yet.
Day Three
After a quick writing on what I know about my partner and a short interview , this piece is incorporation with my handwriting about on Lindy and the portraits I did for her.
As I started my writing about my knowledge for her, I realised I barely know her though I used to have the confident of writing the whole page for we went to so many same classes. Then as moved on to the interview part, I would guess an answer before hearing from her, and I am surprised on how different those two answers could be.
For she loves cats, I wrote a whole page of CATS and glued that beneath the attract profile portrait with cutting the middle part out. And I wrote Failure for her fear and hate for that word. To my surprise a gentle person like her would say the word in such motivated and solid way, then I decided to move this trait of her as the main focus, and with the black and white eyes piece, it suits the mood. For her secret, she told my that she had a weak sense of smell so I cut that line and put that beside the one with twisted proportion with the nose.
Day Four
We visited Hudson river at late night and took a little walk around it. The weather was perfect, humid but not wet, windy but not freezing. The conversation was casual and random. I listened for the most part, also laughed for the most part.
There were seagulls standing on the wooden sticks in the river, and I remembered someone yelled “it barked” and we all laughed so hard. I tried to search for a verb for what I heard from the seagull but the only word in my head was “bark”. they were standing still the whole time, and sometimes they even looked the same direction like some mysterious ritual.
The view at Hudson river was stunning: cold blue lights shivering above the water, and boats with party music howling around. Yet that was not the most interesting thing. The point of visiting that site was the people, the talk and the walk together.
Day Five
We had dinner at Lindy’s place, instead of cooking, I brought take-outs. They were from the Bao, a place for Chinese dumplings.
Because four of us are having dinner together, it is more convenient to bring each one’s favourite. I brought dumplings, beef pancake and fried rice with crab because I wanted to share the taste of my hometown to them.
Then Lindy cooked Italian, Laren brought Mexican, Jamie brought American, and it turned out international.
Day Six
Lindy texted me with saying she did nothing but some laundry while I was doing mine the next day as well, so I was happy that I could find anything I would need for the collage.
I cut up a cotton bag and spreader it all over the page creating a image of cloth bad and I glued the cleaning soup and the drying paper. Also I glued some threads and fluffy balls to present a sense a mess. I kept the colour with a simple warm brown adding a sense of comfort while also conveying the dirty cloth.
Day Seven
My present for Lindy was a doodling of her cats Sebastian and Jelly Bean.
Hand made gifts always have the feeling of specialness, especially drawing something precious for someone. It becomes more meaningful, so when I heard about her two cats on Friday, I decided to draw the cats as the present.
She said that they are at her parents’ house and her cellphone album is filled with pictures of Sebastian and JB, I found the drawing would be perfect.
