Category: Uncategorized

Hasn’t been going that great. Started reading a few books then defaulted back to reading web novels again.

But I *Have* been reading my art books… Well that one line and wash in the urban landscape book by Neil Whitehead. Just like reading a few pages each day ya know? And looking at his art.

I’ve been trying more loose line and wash style of drawings as well… Did a few yesterday, to varying degrees of success (as defined by yours truly). Did some bird paintings in a more detailed, realistic (but still quick, say 30mins or so, with much of the time being waiting for it to dry) birds…. And I took out my cellulose pad to use again… The Clairfontaine watercolor 100% cellulose pads… I wonder if I can finish them before the eventual house moving about half a year later? That’s the aim now I guess. I’ve got 2 A6 pads and a A5 pad to finish… We’ll see.

It’s funny when I look back at my new year’s resolution for the year and it was to finish a sketchbook, or two.

And look what I have now. Four sketchbooks that I finished so far! Granted I was thinking of finishing the Khadi fatbook and the “Make stuff with stories” sketchbook from Nerdforge… And boy is that nerdforge sketchbook thick! (And also, not exactly a fan of that paper…)

But yeah. I have finished a whooping 5 sketchbooks so far! Granted they are mostly tiny ones. But 1x Khadi fat book. 2x small 10×10 cm sketchbook for urban sketching. And 2x tiny 8×8 cm sketchbook for quick human urban sketches. And one of the 8×8 sketchbooks uses thinner, cellulose paper and thus has a ton of pages too. My ‘current’ 10×10 cm urban sketching sketchbook is nearly finished too, but I haven’t been using it at all lately in favor of just doing the quick human ink sketches. I’ve also got a portrait Potentate 100% cotton sketchbook going on, and still used a bit of the Nerdforge sketchbook every now and then… Started using the square format Etchr everyday sketchbook… Using a portait, A6 (ish) sized sketchbook for ink drawings… And also started a new khadi fatbook. And of course, I have another 8×8 cm tiny sketchbook that is in use for quick ink sketches.

This is the year of the sketchbooks and I’m so gonna finish AT LEAST another 2 sketchbooks this year!

Every time I come to this blog, I’m kind of in shock at how time flies.

I’d *just* switched hosting sites and paid big bucks for like… 2 years of web hosting? And stay tuned because I have plans to actually add pages to this site, and share my swatches and urban sketching palettes all in a page.

But… It’s been over a month since I switched things over and I just haven’t gotten round to anything yet.

Between work, weekdaily urban sketching, medical appointments, and interns…

It’s madness, really.

I’ve got new interns to take care of too…. Sigh. Again.

And these two interns aren’t the brightest. Maybe the language barrier is an issue too. Sigh.

Anyway. I am on holiday in Malaysia… Road trip with my parents. Because I said fuck work and took two days off. Partly at the cost of earlier in the week though, having to slog it at work even after the medical appointments in the morning when I could actually have taken the day off. I had MC on Wednesday even but… I ended up having to rush work left and right from after lunch, till 7pm. Sigh.

Trip so far has been ok. Lots of happenings. First day and parents both got food poisoning. No idea what we ate… I was kinda bloated but spared. Then today dad’s credit card got hacked…. Nothing serious and the bank picked up the fraudulent transactions and blocked the card, but still, more drama than we needed on what was supposed to be a peaceful, relaxing, lunch at the cafe in the forest. The cafe is at the foot of a hill and is literally called Hill & Heal. What a place to be receiving an SMS about your credit card being blocked…

So… This trip dad was like “bring your art stuff to draw”. So I did. I also packed a sketchbook for him and mum. First day, it was really hot in the afternoon and all, and I didn’t bring my sketching stuff out. All afternoon dad was saying that I should have brought it along, this would look nice sketched, etc etc. Then in the evening came the food poisoning….

Thankfully they are both much better today. And I ended up doing FOUR! Sketches today! And dad joined in too. Heck. He grabbed a sketchbook, a pencil and a pen from me and carried it along in his little pouch. And he just whips it out and starts sketching before me. And at night at the night market he kept asking if I wanted to sketch too. But it was so ridiculously crowded… I said no. 4 sketches in a day is good enough for me. We are here till Sunday (probably just heading back to SG after breakfast), so there’s still tomorrow! Oh yeah. We were at Kluang yesterday till this afternoon, and now in Malacca… So yeah. All 4 sketches were done in Kluang… Getting all the Kluang action in. But tomorrow! I will be able to get some Malacca action in for sure!

Follow themessydeskxyz on Cara if you want to get in on the action. Though I’ve yet to post the sketches from this trip. There’s so many! And the internet here has been a little spotty. Some messages just refuse to go through on discord! This hotel WIFI is pretty decent though, thankfully. Alright. I guess I’ll this post here, and get ready to sleep. Night night!

What?

Yeah, site hosting is finally complete. You wouldn’t notice a single thing. But under the hood things have changed. I moved to a different web hosting provider, and on a cheaper plan since, I just don’t need such an expensive plan for a hobby site anyway. Heck. Even a free blog will do at the moment really. But it’s all done now. Save myself a couple of hundred bucks… Web hosting prices have certainly gone up over the years… Together with energy prices I guess? The war and all….

Anyway, that means more money for art supplies I guess?

And maybe I’ll put up a proper About page and everything soon. But for now I’d better get going to work!

It’s feels like I’d JUST made a special effort to post here, talking about my move to using Cara, doing weekdaily art sketches… And treating Cara as a mini blog… Well. It’s now Aug.

I’ve not stopped… Still doing those week daily sketches, though I’m not exactly always motivated. But it still gets done anyway and I guess that’s what matters.

I’m just sitting around in a stall today… Finally had the medical appointment that I’ve been waiting for since like… 4 months ago. Got some fancy and expensive inhalers…. And things just ended up taking much longer than expected, as usual. Just finished my lunch and a work call, and now I’m free for the day to sketch!

Only that I am feeling tired and uninspired again…. What’s new geez.

I packed new supplies to bring out today. Panned out all my shiny holbein gouache (like literally the golds, silvers, and bronze paints) into a tiny palette. It isn’t fully dry yet and made a big mess on the lid but yeah ok… Gotta let it dry more tonight. I also bought my new shinhan gouache set out… Which I may or may not use…. Idk how I feel about urban sketching with gouache… But I guess the only right answer is to give it a try….

I’ve also been wanting to put together like a granulating palette for outside use, and the urban watercolor LE set by schmincke really was the nail in the coffin for me. I just wanted to use those colors outside, in a sketch and wash sort of style. So yeah. I put a couple of half pans together in a little palette, 12 colors. Yeah it’s a much bigger foot print than my usual tiny 3d printed palette but meh. All good I think. I just have a crap ton of palettes with me now, and a very heavy JustGoSketching bag with all the supplies… And oh yeah I bought my ipad along too.

Which is why I’m writing this post. I have to use my iPad now that I’ve lugged it out right?

So yeah….

Gah. I feel like I’m not fully making sense now. Tired. Brain never quite really woke up today I think… Meh. I’ll think I’ll change spots… Either look for someplace with drinks (hopefully not too expensive), or with something sketch worthy. Idk. I bought out my larger, A5 Potentate sketchbook today. Partly why I switched to the JustGoSketching. That can fit a bigger sketchbook. Hmm yeah. That’s all for now. Till next time!

I have ‘moved’ to Cara. Kinda. Tldr: Follow me here to see my art works.

I will mostly only be posting my art to Cara I guess. I *might* post art occasionally to instagram. A big *might*. Sure, as a hobby artist I’m not like, loosing money or anything to the meta AI. But ethically it disgusts me so much. I would have to figure out the whole glaze thing on Cara… If it’s easy to download the glazed images from Cara and repost it on instagram, I would do that. Otherwise… I don’t really feel like posting my art to instagram anymore. I’m going to be doing so much more art moving forward and I’d rather post it all to a proper, art centric platform, and Cara is it.

My old instagram posts are not going anywhere, nor is my account… But I’ll slowly repost some stuff onto Cara I guess. Including adding the pieces that I’m proud of to Cara. And mini blogging there too. Like twitter, but longer. I am enjoying myself so much there. The ability to just write long posts without worrying about the word limit especially. Yeah, it’s 5k characters but I’ve wrote a pretty long post,, said everything I needed, and kept it under 5k characters. And it’s mostly just, much easier to do on mobile and that means I’m posting there a lot more often.

In fact I’ve talked about everything art related that I’ve done recently there. Setting up my urban sketching palette (night time edition)… Getting a new etchr field case and filling that up…

Definitely check out my profile there. I’m a lot more active on there than I have ever been on this blog, and will ever be I guess. A blog post feels like something that I have to take more time to write, write something longer, more substantial. Whereas that gate isn’t there with Cara.

I’ve kinda been on an urban sketching mania lately, and apart from the ridiculously hot weather, I’ve been enjoying it lots. I want to put together more tiny palettes and bring that out. But I have to figure the clipping situation out… It’s so fun though. Tiny paintings and tiny palettes…

Alright. I’m also so very tired now, so I guess I’ll end off here. Mostly just wanted to share my Cara profile link. Good night!

I have been sketching a ton. And just making a ton of art in general. For the past like… Week or so, I have been doing at least a sketch on the way home. By that, I mean, I stop somewhere along the route home and sketch. Unfortunately… I also dropped my expensive rotring 800 while sketching yesterday. (Or well, the day before since it’s past midnight.) Arghs. Not sure if I can still find it… But I’ll take a look tomorrow… It is on the way to work after all. Sigh.

I started sharing my urban sketches to instagram, thought I should update it more… But the whole AI scrapping thing is really putting a bad taste in my mouse… Like. Yeah there’s way more people using instagram… But… I don’t know. But I’ll be posting a lot more on Cara for now. And I think more people are flocking to Cara now precisely because of these AI issues. A schoolmate and acquaintance of mine (and a professional, accomplished, photographer) made the app, specifically for artists. It’s definitely built with professionals in mind… And I’m not sure how it’ll grow as a place for more casual artists like myself etc. The app is still in beta and it’s still early days… But whatever. I’m gonna give it a go and see. I haven’t been using instagram much after they switch the feed format/algorithm anyway. I just go in, see if my close friends posted any new stories, and at most scroll 5 items into my feed then get out. I definitely used instagram a lot less after the change because I mostly only want to see the stuff my friends post.

Anyway, here is my cara profile. Make an account and follow me there!https://cara.app/themessydeskxyz

I’m also liking the 5000 character count limit on Cara. It’s longer than instagram and I kinda… treat it like a microblog as well. I guess it is what I make of it after all, who’s to tell me how I should or should not use it? After all the twitter/X nonsense and now facebook with it’s Meta AI shit… Yeah a lot of people went to like mastodon and stuff? I haven’t used it at all lol. Maybe I should… But for now I’ll be posting my art stuff on Cara, and post longer backstories and thoughts and what not there. Mini blogs. Not as time consuming as my full blown blogs like this one, but something I’d be able to do way more often… So do check out my profile there. I’ve been posting all my urban sketches there as well.

Alright. It’s really late and I really should get some sleep. Good night and till next time!

And art supplies. Lots of art supplies.

So much so for the low buy huh. I just ordered a bunch of rosemary and co brushes this morning, and because there were sales, I bought more beam paints and more blue pine arts paints like… last week or something? Yeah… Bad me.

And erm. Arrtx simptap markers arrived last night and I had some fun playing with them. They seem a bit more dry and less wet than I’d have preferred… And being brush nibs perhaps? They performed really poorly on the Khadi fatbook, which has become my favourite sketchbook now. Not for acrylic paint markers I guess. The nerdforge hot press sketchbook is great for that.

Which brings me to the main reason for updating the blog. My sketchbook usage! Started the khadi fatbook just this year and I’ve already gone through more than half of it! Similarly I’m past the halfway mark in the Nerdforge sketchbook, although that was started like mid last year? But I wanted to finish at least one, hopefully two sketchbooks this year, and more specifically I had these two sketchbooks in mind when I wrote my New Year’s resolutions, so I’m glad that it’s been going well. Definitely going to finish up this first Khadi fatbook and then I can break into the new one! I bought a whole set of three nerdforge sketchbooks as well, and on top of that I bought two of the same green covered sketchbook first, so that means I have nerdforge sketchbooks aplenty to use…!

Alright. I guess I’ll end off here, because I want to do another “blind” solve maybe (see my other blog!), and then shower, and do some art!

It’s only the start of May, but there’s been quite a bit of ups and downs in terms of my emotions thus far. I cleared most of my penpal letters, then ran out of steam for the last few, which I’ve still not replied to this date…

But I sent out a whole bunch of art… And then painted lots more. Finally also got around to organising most of the more recently purchased watercolors, panning them out (as in, putting into half pans) and swatching some of them.

Here’s what I just did on like… This past Thursday? That will have to suffice for my art this weekend/week… Since I am here now in Lotus Desaru Beach Resort & Spa, just staying here for the weekend aka one night. I bought along my iPad (which is what I’m typing this entry on), and a 3×3 cube and a clock. Will talk more about the cubing stuff in my other blog. But no art supplies on this trip. I mean, there’s really not much time since we are only staying for a night!

I tried doing an urban landscape last weekend with my holbein gouache and that turned out nicer than expected.

Also… Gosh, the new granulating colors that holbein announced on their instagram. The colors looks amazing and I am a sucker for granulating watercolors AND color separating/chromatography stuff. Like the dusk colors in the Rembrandt line. Gosh. There goes my money again. I want those. All of it. Fuck. I think I’m gonna be collecting the entire series of them…? Well depends on how many colors they will have in total I guess. So far they have announced 12 colors. A very collectable number thus far.

I’ve kinda tried to reduce the buying… But also not really. Just placed a fairly large order for Blue Pine Arts watercolors, because of their 25% rebranding sale… And I stocked up a lot on my Kuben’s gold pan. And also bought a lot of other shiny colors. Yeah. Absolutely in love with Kuben’s gold. Also ordered some more shinies from Renneiscence colors… Gonna have to dig out my current supply of those and use them…

I also… Decided to take the plunge and get those arrtx simptap markers. After being tempted by them for ages. Reason being because there was an abstract piece that I tried to do with gouache and I had to keep laying on the gouache and wait for it to dry between coats (or well, use the heat gun, which I did)… It was a long process. Would have been way faster with arcylic markers. And the posca pens kinda do the splattering thing on certain surfaces with annoys me soooo much. Either way. I’ve been tempted for months and finally decided to do it.

Also, absolutely in love with shinies. Shiny gouache is what I’ve been using. Mostly holbein. And that one Kuben’s gold from BPA. Hope more will join me soon. I wonder when they will ship it out… Because I did add on some paper products which they said are preorders and will take a month before they are shipped… I wonder if they will do two shippings… I did buy a lot afterall! We’ll see.

Hmmm. That’s it for now I guess. Till next time! It’s getting late and I still want to blog about cubing!