When we tried our andy warhol.

Just because we can! 

Bon Apetit!

The super easy super tasty garlic pull apart bread loaf I made today! It is so good :) 

It needs very basic ingredients and the outcome is just wow! 

I followed the recipe I found in this brilliant blog, Edible Garden and tralala, it is awesome!
Check this recipe out and try, all of you who want to bake something nice.

The only change I made to the original recipe was, I added a little more butter, because, Julia Child said so :)

See the original recipe here.

            Bon Apetit!

Fifty Shades of De

Corny as it might sound, I had announced few days back to have a 'Fifty Shades of De' series. De is the bestest friend I can ask for and I am taking it seriously! I will, in the course of time, attempt fifty or more portraits of De.

You might remember this one.

I also had a short lived cartoon series from the time we were roomies in hyderabad... 

Here is the new flower girl De :) 

That is three down, 47 more to go.

Ria De of my life. Thanks a lot for being there and being you, man :) I hope you won't mind the grey parody title, It sounds way cooler when it is Shades of De :) 

Love, 

There is a flower on my wall :)

Big surprise (as if) ! I have decided to make the work desk wall prettier and added a big flower! This is dedicated to all those school years making pookkalams, (flower carpets is something I would never want to call them)... Well, there is a big flower above my work desk now.

It does not look this tidy all the time, thanks to my constant mess maker. I tidied up just for the photo and minutes later, the scene became a crime scene!

I had a lot of black paint leftover from the other big wall project  and I love working with black paint. But this would look prettier even with any other colour don't you think? It is fun adding bold statement accents to plain white walls.

Not that we had a perfect white wall to begin with. The wall was covered with a certain someone's artful doodles :) What wonderful backdrop for a design!

I can even call it a collaboration project of me and the boy.

Things currently on my desk, aka deskfie!

Two lovely books I am reading and re-reading and slow-reading and translating. My sketchbook.

Spiderman and another superhero whose name I dont know, but whose head was destroyed by a certain somebody.

Bunny with a carrot, a little birdie and the ever favorite doctor panda! These are the boy's favorite people right now.

Brushes, pencils, thermometer (sigh! we were fighting recurring colds and fevers lately), big bottle of black acrylic paint, my trusted camel water colour box.

Hot pink yarn! The boring hospital like table cloth also got an arrowed makeover using, big surprise again, black acrylic paint by your's truly!

Reflections!

And us.

More later! Ta Ta!

You are the butter to my bread!

This post is dedicated to the most amazing cook I am married to. The kitchen is where a lot of our hours are so lovingly spent and I wanted to add some cuteness to the kitchen wall. The illustration is not an original, I copied it from here. I wanted to keep the recipe of a bread I frequently made on the kitchen wall where I can quickly take a glance at when I am mixing it and that is how it all began. Julia Child is always a lovely lovely inspiration. 

It all worked well, don't you think? The photo frames are from the euro shop, the european equivalent to a dollar store most crafters are familiar with.

Calligraphy is another thing I want to try perfecting. Right now it is in this hopelessly amateurish enthusiast level, I know. But some day, some day!

The very cute butter and bread couple!

This is not a complete bread recipe, but it is the no knead artisan bread recipe popularized by Newyork times. I  followed the recipe I found here. It is super simple with next to no ingredients and the bread is this lovely hard crusted artisan bread type. Once you take it out of the oven, you will be surprised that you made it all by yourself! One has to go through that experience to understand the feeling :)

Some character to an otherwise boring wall!

And here is a picture of the bread I baked :) It is so pretty, it is almost an art installation. The way the bread sings in the oven, the way the patterns on the crust evolve, everything is so therapeutic. Baking helped me get through a lot of sadness and depression in the winter months spent in Germany. I am starting to understand why people move to colder weathered countries and almost immediately start posting pictures of things they cooked! When the weather is so bitter cold outside, food you make is pretty much the only warm and happy tangible thing you can have.

I could go on, but I have work to do now. See you soon.
More later.

Similar but not the same

So I spent some 15 minutes today to play around with two techniques and a same style and it ended in two sketches that are similar but not the same.

For the first one, I first painted the whole thing and then sketched the outline once everything was semi-dry. 

 And the second one was done the other way round, first I doodled with my sketchpen and then filled it all with colour.

I decided to stick to the same colour pallette so that I will know how it will look like in the end.
When one is a self taught artist, one has to try out stuff to learn stuff. Not bad, eh?

Which one do you guys prefer? I cannot decide myself, I like them both. I dont even know if the technique differences count in the end product. I personally like the process of painting first and then sketching more because it gives me a freedom to improvise as I doodle. But the other way round is fun too. 

Write to me, let me know your thoughts in comments!

Tschuss! (That means bye in German! I know, I am showing off. )

Pages from the life of a journal junkie

I love everything about a sketchbook journal. I relax and workout inside the pages of my sketchbook. My sketchbook has my random thoughts, ideas that needs to be worked on, designs and patterns I want to try and just about anything and everything I might want to try putting ink on.

I sketch at all times. I sketch when I am happy or gloomy. I sketch when I am in doubt. I sketch when I want to celebrate. I sketch because I know no other way to reach pure unadulterated exhiliarating bliss. I love me the most when I play with colours. Take a peek into the pages of my new sketchbook...

I am that person who doesn't start a sketchbook on the first white sheet inside, but will start working literally from cover to cover. The idea is to not waste any kind of workable surface. Cover everything with art is kind of my style :)

New sketchbook cover makeover.

Forgot to take a before picture, it was just a plain cover with some paper quality and size written on it.

 This little kitty was for daniel and was copied from elsewhere.  the flower is mine :) 

Playing with pattern is lots of fun!

Mixing poetry and paint is clearly one of my favorite techniques...

I will soon come out with a post with my interpretation of fifty shades of De. But since this grim portrait of de was part of the sketchbook, here goes :) Ria De, the bestest friend one can ever have. 

The original photograph of this birdie was much more stunning and stark!

More random doodling and sketching...

I wish I had flowers instead of hair! :)