Where?

They floated there, the ballons, tied down like captive bubbles.

They looked at me, so tempting, so inviting.

Maybe I took one too many…

Maybe not enough.

But if they take me to you, it’s all that matters.

Cheers, NM

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The wind blew strongly from the sea..

yet they all held fast to their ground.

Only their huge arms gave in to the winds’ desire…

only thier arms… and my hair.

Slowly, slowly it dies away

but it does not go with out a fight,

with out speaking its mind,

without leaving it’s mark in the world,

it paints the sky in oranges and gold

it damps the air in breathes of summer’s end

and warm glow.

Cheers, NM

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“An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.”
-Eduard Hanslick

I love the serene look of a person contemplating, thinking, lost in their thoughts, and with their eyes lost in their thoughts.

Recently, I drew some small sketches with this idea: a person, a girl, contemplating. I really like how they came out, they had that serene look I really like.

Now, the other day that I was at a bookstore, while browsing the art section, I came upon this curious thing: a paperpen, yes that’s right. And as the name says, it is a pen made of paper. Now, I wondered what it was for, so naturally I bought it

Paperpen

I remember how years ago my mother had taught me to use a piece of paper to blend color from color pencils on paper, so using the same idea, I started experimenting with the paperpen on several pencil drawings. After using the paperpen on pencil, the result was a much smoother image, the shadows blended better, and instead of having obvious divisions of light and dark, using the paperpen helped blend that line and give it a better transition, which is rather nice.

Let me illustrate what I mean:

Here is one before the paperpen:

notice the rough lines and shadows. Now, here is the finished one:

Notice the difference?

Here are others I made the same way:

Hope you enjoy them.

Cheers, NM

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So, here in Taiwan, 7-11 has a tendency of having lots of promotions every few months. Recently, it had it’s 30th anniversary of being in Taiwan, and of course, it made a promotion: for every 30nt$ you spent, it gave you a point, when you collected 30 points, you could exchange it for one of the several things they offered, among them dounuts and starbucks’ drinks.

Now, I have a friend who has always said she likes 7-11, stating it is our BEST friend we took this lightly… until yesterday when talking about collecting points and how many points we each had.

This is my other friend holding up all the points she had collected:

7-11 points

In total, there were 137 points.

so we ended up eating dounuts and drinking a frapiccino in Starbucks’, which was really nice ^_^. I only managed to snap this shot after the dounuts were gone

yum! donuts and frapuccinos

Cheers, NM

p.s.: hopefully, from now on, cellyphone pictures will be less I finally got new bateries for my cam!

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Typhoon today over Taiwan, that just means one thing: rain, lots of rain, and wind.

Most of the central and southern part is flooded. News keep showing all the damage in those areas, which is quite a lot. Rural areas were flooded so that only rooftops were visible, and in some cities, the water level reached the bottom of cars. Really sad. Fortunately it’s calmed down now, so it’ll soon start getting back to normal. Which is good.

Thankfully the weather here wasn’t that bad, just lots of rain and wind, which managed to break my umbrella while on my way to classes. Naturally I ended all wet. Sigh.

So I’ve spent most of my day indoors, cleaning up the water that seeped into my room and sewing

Apart from that, there’s not much to say, nothing else has happened. So I’ll shall end this post with a few pics:

Hsinchu cityscape from the 12th floor of Sogo:

and the Train station, which is down below Sogo:

Finally, something I saw the other day that just cracked me up :

I just gotta say that is one HUGE! pudding, talk about family size. (It actually weighed quite a bit)

heh.

Well that’s all for now. Enjoy.

Cheers, NM

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At the early hours of 11:37 am of Thursday morning my friend called me. Yes that is early, considering I went to sleep at 6 am, it is early.

No my friend is not evil. My celly is Evil*.

Anyways. She called me to go off on the trip of the week: she invited me to go with her family to a theme park “Window on China“. Great fun, roller coasters and water by the tons, small scaled villages and lots of sun (it being summer in Taiwan, the heat and sun is to be expected of course.) but never the less, it was great fun.

We rode on every fun (fast) ride they had. I personally loved one called Wipeout, which was a lovely centrifugal ride, just turning and going up and down. My friend wasn’t so crazy bout that one she preferred the dark space-type roller coaster (you know, those ones that are all in the dark with just an eventual light here and there) That, I must admit was great fun, twists and turns, ups and downs and, as my friend made sure everybody could hear, points where your “differential was zero!” (that for the non-nerds/geeks are the highest points on a roller coaster, i.e. the peaks before the fall downward.) For my part, I was either laughing uncontrollably or just plain screaming, but I desisted from that when the girl in the front car screamed for everybody in the ride.

By the seventh turn on that roller coaster, we were quite relaxed and enjoying the ride… except the odd halt just before the end, talk about a solution to lack of space. The first time it almost injured our necks, as it throws you forward quite hard, due to it coming at a rather high speed and then suddenly stopping. Anyways, enough physics… for now ;).

But overall, I must say it was very enjoyable, and a great way to spend time and liberate a bit of bottled up stress and energy.

Another one was this one where they threw us down a nice [very] inclined slope with water (you can imagine the result of that :)) which was quite high over the park (maybe 500 meters? dunno, I’m not good at estimating that) we came out all dripping wet. Thankfully I had my bathing suit on, so no prob for me ^_^.

Now, the other attraction of the park is a collection of small scale models of several important or famous buildings and places in Taiwan, China, Japan and Europe. The ones from Taiwan are incredibly similar to their real counter parts, the detail is quite nice and at night the have all the lights on in the windows, make it a great sight.

The ones in China are also nice, including small people moving around. The Japanese ones (my favorites) we only managed to see them towards the end (you wouldn’t imagine how similar some of the Chinese models were to several Japanese building models. But as my friend pointed out, it’s more of how the Japanese imported architecture details from China. Quite true.) The European ones left me some doubt as to their accuracy, as the Parthenon from Greece look a bit too complete and other structures were a little dubious.

In the end, it was all great fun. Here are some pics ^_^. Enjoy.
Taipei… in a nutshell:

My Friend:

Just makes me want to have tea:

More in the photo page ^_^

Cheers, NM.

* Evil, by Interpol

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So today as I was strolling after my dinner, I went into the bookstore near the uni campus (I, btw, just love bookstores and office supplies stores if I could I’d buy everything in them… but then I’d be broke) and started looking at the art section. Now, for a while I’d been meaning to buy myself a set of watercolor paints, but hadn’t because of classes, too much homework and reports. But then I thought, because I’m now in summer vacation, it’s not such a bad idea, so I bought them, a nice new set of 12 watercolor paints.

I get home and start experimenting with them a bit, mixing colors and all. So after a while, I manage to produce this:

It’s not so bad (in my opinion), though I’m not exactly thrilled as to how the hair lights turned out, or the lips, wanted something more subtle, but then again being the first attempt, it ain’t so bad. Definitely will keep trying, I really like how you can layer the paint and how it creates great light effects.
Well then, that said, I’ve lately done other sketches, but till now I post them cause I’m a bit lazy with the scanner. Anyways. First, I finished Spring for the fairies of the four seasons, really like the fact that I could add much more color and detail to this one, gives it a nice feeling:

Again, calligraphy pen and watercolor pencils. (I’ve found a not so good side to these. I really like how the color comes out rather bold [compare it to the skin color which is from a normal color pencil] but they tend to rub of on the other pages. Thankfully, it doesn’t smear the drawing.)

Finally, something I did a while back:

I really love fractals, everything from their symmetry to their somewhat mathematical nature, and everything in between. I find them so unique and complex, yet they are composed of the same repeating shape. For this one, I begun with a circle, and then started to do arrow head like shapes around. I purposely did it offset from the center, so as to balance out so much symmetry with a little anti-symmetry.

Also new pics in the photos section. ^_^

Well, that’s all for the moment.

Hope you enjoyed it.

Cheers, NM

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Hallo everybody!

Yay! Classes are out! Finals are over! and now… comes the time for nail biting and waiting for final grades, sigh. Let’s just hope all is well.

So let’s see, where shall we start.

I did one last update on the Sketchbook Month challenge, though unfourtunately my goal wasn’t met… I’m still drawing, though, and have done some good drawings and taken up color pencils again. Here are two of the ones I did recently:

Summer:

Winter:

I love using a Chinese calligraphy pen (you know, those that the tip is like a brush) allows you to control the thickness of the line and flows very well over paper, which is quite good. Also, love how the hair texture comes out using that pen. As for the color pencils, they are actually watercolor, which would explain a bit of the odd texture, compared with the skin color, which is from a normal pencil.

Anyways, I’m doing the four seasons, so I’m just short Autumn and Spring (actually, autumn is in the back of a friend’s final term paper I’ll try and get that, though no color.) Spring is on the way.

Also, I finished my printmaking course, the prints came out nice, will scan them soon then post them

Now the riddle. Well, last month’s (or is it last last month’s? dunno… I tend to lose track of time easily :D) riddle found no answer, so it’ll probably end up in the unanswered category for future pondering. Hopefully this week I’ll think up of another fun riddle and post it.

Anyways, that’s mostly all for now.

Cheers, NM

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Hallo everybody,

This is the first “Riddle me this…” post. The idea of these posts is to place a question/challenge/riddle/puzzle at least once or twice a month, where anyone can discuss the riddle, propose a solution to it or just ponder about it. The riddles can be from any field of study or from everyday common sense. So, without more explanation, the first riddle:

“What is the fastest way to empty a bottle? does the geometry of the bottle matter, (i.e. does a long neck, round short body, short neck, long narrow body, etc. matter)? does the density of the liquid affect the rate of emptying?”

(the main idea was taken from C. Schiller’s book “Motion Mountain”, and a few tweaks of my own were added.)
So there you have it, the first riddle.

Probably by the end of the month I’ll try and post the answer. If I don’t manage to find an answer, and there was no plausible proposed answer, then the riddle will be placed in the “Unsolved Riddles” for future solutions from any curious mind.

Enjoy.

Cheers, NM

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Hallo everybody,

This semester I took a printmaking class, so we had to make preliminary drawings of what we wanted to draw on the plaques, this is what I did for the last plaque:

hopefully I’ll be done with the plaque this week and by the next I’ll be able to print it. I’ll post that as soon as it’s done.

Cheers, NM

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