Eating, drinking & sketching....

Intro Bar at Raffles City, nice place to chill.

Food Republic at City Square.

Amoy Street Food Center

Amoy Street is one part of Singapore that I don't venture to until I started sketching with the Urban Sketchers and painting with some of the members of the Watercolor Society. I went up to the second floor of the Amoy Street food center to escape the heat and also since there isn't much sitting space on the ground floor. Yes much cooler and less crowded. I managed to finish the sketch and added wash just before the place was filled with the lunch time crowd.

Amoy Street with Hero Pen and Watercolor Wash

Sorry for posting an old sketch I did this year August. :D

kitchen with a view

ODP has been around for a while in Tiong Bahru area next to Bookactually but it was my first visit to the restaurant. ODP means Open Door Policy. I was sitting at the counter with a clear view into the kitchen through the big piece of glass. This sketch took me less than 20 minutes and people inside and outside the kitchen were visibly shocked at the speed and pleased at the final result.

Smith Street Sketches - fun with mark makings

I guess I am more akin to mark making when I sketch, whether I am sketching people or building. These marks form a representation of the subject or object I am drawing, though I am fully aware of the rules of proper proportion, perspective and structure.

There are 2 distinct forms of mark making; Hatching and tonal modeling. There is also one other called pointillism which is fundamentally a hatching technique using dots.

Painting is also mark making - every brush stroke and every mark culminates to form a pleasant composition of shapes, colors, tones and design.

A good example is shown in Woon Lam's color sketches or paintings. Mark making is the foundation to all drawings and paintings alike.

In the mark making process, you can make every mark to mean something; you can also make the marks to represent something. Sometimes the marks can be literal or they can be impressionistic. I try to leave rooms for the viewer to fill in with their imaginations.

When you are more involved with mark making then simply drawing what you see, the process of drawing becomes a lot more exciting and fun to do.

Railway Station from Blair Road

The other day I drove by this place and took a quick glance out from the car's window. All I could see is a huge grass patch void of any human activity. The zinc roofed buildings are gone, the rails and the posts have been taken away. Its another piece of empty land awaiting for a condo or a shopping mall to be built on, or maybe a residential area. Who knows. Or they could preserve the land to turn it into a park. There are some talks about it but I don't have good feelings about these discussions.

Drawing my drawing tools...

Hero pen, Noodler's ink on watercolor paper. Ink washes. Sketching my tools is really fun.

Singapore has no scarcity of food... despite the fact that we do not have four seasons, we are compensated with five seasons of food to choose from. The multi-racial and cultural nature of Singapore has given the people a wide variety of cuisines and food types we couldn't really finish them all in our life time. In Singapore it is all about eating... we eat 5 meals per day!! We are a melting pot of food; western, chinese, south east asian, indian, middle eastern, muslim and many more. It is my quest to eat and sketch at these places!! (And not become too fat later on).:D