The Rookie Tries: Baking for Christmas

Ho ho ho!

It's actually been ages since we put up a Christmas tree. So to make up for it, I baked a cake! A chocolate chiffon cake, to be exact. I iced it so, so that it may somehow look like those Christmassy door wreaths that people hang during Christmas.

It was fun and hard at the same time decorating the cake. Well what did I expect...I am a rookie at these kinds of things, after all. Or was. Haha! Just kidding. I made a lot of mistakes. Good thing I was able to cover them up pretty well ;)

I wanted the pink buttercream to be red, but the supermarket that we went to only had what they called 'rose red' and orange. Turns out that rose red was pink, but oh well. The green icing was bought from my Singapore trip, and when it sort of dried up, suprisingly went so well against the softness cake and the pink buttercream :9

Not-so-Christmas-themed cupcakes made from spare batter :9

(Clockwise from top left: little roses, heart, daisy-ish flower, star)

The Rookie Tries: Abstract Painting

The title says it all! The main reason I decided to do this was because I still had a reasonable amount of acrylic paint left from my art class in high school ;P That painting, and a few others belonging to my friends, never returned to the hands of their owners. It's vexing, because it was my first painting on a canvas and I spent a reasonable amount of time on it, so I really wanted to treasure it. Ah, the sentimental value it had despite its lack of neatness! Haha! Another reason was that I wanted to see just what I could do with my nooby painting skills.

I made my first ever canvas painting for art class, so this is my second. To be really accurate, this also isn't my first try at abstract painting; it's my second. I made my first one on a canvas without a frame in 2007, following a manual. The colour scheme I used for it was purely blue, but on this one, as per my brother's suggestion, I decided to use all the colours related to mint. I'm really loving mint lately. My brother loves green and I love blue, so no debates were involved. Not that my brother actually had anything to do with the making of this painting, but it's good to ask for suggestions from others :P

Before I began, I stole (read: temporarily borrowed without permission) my brother's brushes and acrylic paint tubes. He won't be using them anytime soon anyway, since he's practically always glued to his computer. I had my own remnants-of-art-class paint, but I peeked into his, and to my surprise, he had two tubes of different shades of green. One was phthalo green, a dark shade of green, and the other was light green, a grassier hue.

 

An empty 20cmx20cm square canvas, brushes of various shapes, a palette and tubes of acrylic paint. I love and hate the fact that acrylic paint dries so quickly.You can't see it in the picture, but I had thinly sketched random quadrilaterals in a mint colour pencil to aid my colouring.

The finished result?