Welcome myself to Polyvore

Easy by amandagrey featuring scoop neck tops

Ahah! I found another fun and exciting thing to share. I have just registered in Polyvore today! Thanks to my friend Bless who is already into it a long time ago. She's actually starting her own design blog and that excites me. She will be sharing her Polyvore works, and will also design her own templates soon, and these will be for free. So once the site is up, I will let you guys know about it. Well, the works of an amateur I have shown above is just a 2-minute set. Next time I will be more patient in doing my sets. That is why I called my first one -Easy. You know I really like an outgoing kinda easy touch to my fashion statement most of the time because I'm a mommy who is most of the time busy and on the go so, I don't want to make my wardrobe complicated. I kinda played around some more with one I called Come with me, Girl Power and City girl. It is fun, so fun.

Andre's Battleship

After watching the movie Battleship, my kids just can't get over it. It was the talk of the table for sometime. Prior to this, they were watching Scoobydoo and some ghost ship and ugly pirates in it. And so Andre, my 7-year old son who is immensely addicted to drawing anything that sticks into his mind - brought out his sketch pad and came out with this nice drawings. His dad calls him an architect in the making. Let me see what you think. Below are photos of his drawings of the USS Missouri in various angles. The fourth one is the same ship made up of blocks.

Angry Birds ala Avengers by Sean

Sean's artistic talent and addiction to Avengers got mixed in this most recent set of drawings he did. They turned out so cool, I am amazed there's no doubt. I hope the concept is really original as he said, to make sure he's not violating any copyright out there. Well, among the characters he created, I liked most his version of Iron Man which he named Iron Beak, and Captain America who turned into Captain Angry. Black widow's reincarnation - Black Bird-ow was so nicely conceptualized as it really looked so strong yet feminine, 'must have something to do with the eyes and the pink hair. My criticisms, though, which I told Sean is the version of Thor - Thor with Egg Hammer. Thor, who happens to be my big crush, is way more good looking than Sean's version. But overall, I'm so proud of Sean. He's really so talented - a cartoonist in the making. What can I say?

Busy with blocks

If there is any other thing Andre's busy with aside from sketching - it's building blocks -even his Jenga blocks are not being used for what it's meant for coz he likes to build things - a lot! He's got some nice, sometimes unbelievable, creations. I have no idea how he came up with these things in his mind because whenever he does them - he doesn't have any object in front of him to imitate. It must be there already in his mind - the picture of the objects he's building. The one above is a pirate ship. And owing to his addiction of Harry Potter, the train below is his version of the Hogwarts Express. This one below is, according to him, the Empire State Building inspired by Percy Jackson. Not bad huh?
This one below is an earlier version of pirate ship, because he liked Peter Pan.
And last but not the least - here's Andre's Ron Weasley's house in Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince.

Sean's Phineas and Ferb

From Sean's sketches

After featuring Andre's works, it's only fair I do the same with his older brother's artworks. Here is Sean's rare sketch of one of his favorites - Phineas and Ferb. It's a pity I wasn't able to document his drawings before. He also had lots of sketches like Andre. But more than sketching, Sean is more into building things out of Lego. Check out that post about Sean, the lego artist. He has created cute Wall-e, and Optimus and Jetfire together, Devastator, and Demolishor from his most favorite movie Transformers. There are also T-rex, spinosaurus, and various vehicles on this post. We're so glad and proud of both Andre and Sean, they're really talented.

Learning botanical illustration

My fondness of nature's elegant beauty comes out once more. I've searched the net high and low to learn how to draw botanics. I'm deeply infatuated with botanical sketches nowadays. The more vintage the sketches are, the lovelier they look. As you may know already, those who have been following my posts, I take a lot of inspiration from my favorite - Amy Merrick and her blog. But deeply loving nature is innate to me, it is not an overnight thing, I remember having my own garden in our humble home back in the province when I was still in grade school, I took community beautification as my girl scout project in high school, I would have preferred to study Forestry  in college but my dad talked me out of it coz women foresters, he said, would only get deployed in the office and not on field, I felt elated when I got in UP Los Banos because of its vast, naturally beautiful campus. And Botany was my favorite in Biology class. There's something in me that tells me - maybe I used to be a botanist, or a florist, or maybe a lady-gardener in my past life.(Above photo from here, below was taken from here)


Botanical illustration is what I've been wanting to learn for a long time. Here, I found a great tutorial blog for botanical drawing -Val Webb's The Illustrated Garden. Check out her site, there are video illustrations, clear ones unlike the others, on how to draw flowers. I tried to follow her step by step instruction on drawing a petunia. I came up with the drawing in pencil below,pardon coz it's quite messy. But it's way better I guess than the 2-dimensional drawings I first did (far below). The pencil is what I'm going to study first, the watercolors can follow later. I thought at first it's not difficult because the flower looks so simple. But it's not. You've got to be very careful with angle, shading can be tricky. It's not easy to achieve the 3-dimensional view of the flower.


If like me, you want to get serious with drawing, these are the other online tutorial links I recommend because the instructions come with pictures, just great for newbies:
O Sweet Nature - for watercolor tutorial
Art Graphica - for colored pencils

Andre's sketches

Andre has been busy again recently with his sketches. I'd like to share some of them. Pardon the messy sketches, he has a habit of sketching many stuffs in one small page making it difficult for me to crop things to separate one from the other. The one above is the skyline of Paris, only the Eiffel Tower is smaller relative to other nearby structures. You would notice this if you compare it with the actual Paris skyline photo below (photo owner here).

This one below looks like a truck carrying a boat? (see top part), silly me. Next to this is well, a boat, that looks rather incomplete/unfinished. But I like the angle of this sketch.


Now here's a messy Lightning Mcqueen. One thing about Andre's sketching is that he rarely used a pencil, always a ballpoint - so that explains the ruggedness of his drawings, and without colors. This is perhaps his own style of drawing, that - I respect and admire.

This one below - he told me, is the house in the movie Signs (Mel Gibson) with the alien spaceships looming ahead. Brilliant. Then there is Astroboy, one of his favorite movies.


This finale is Andre's ever favorite subject, the house of Mr. Fredricksen in UP the movie. It is also my most favorite among his artworks - because even if it is very tiny, no more than 3 inches in length, it has great details in it. Check out Andre's other art works on this movie.

Andre is my younger son. He's now 6 years old. He loves sketching very much, among his other favorite drawing subjects are Harry Potter's Hogwarts School, Ron's house, Hogwarts Express. 'Gotta dig up those and put them all up in here. This is all for now.

Growing Up

'Remember my post about the movie Up? Well, my younger son is actually not over it yet and his fondness seems to be growing as he himself grows up. He drew Mr. Fredricksen's house with the balloons on it in many pages of his sketch pads over and over again in different angles, different scenes. He was only 4 when the movie came out, now he's 6 and he still loves it. He has made himself lots of versions out of Lego, be it simple or 3D, used blocks too, and improvised with small balls of styrofoam for the balloons.

The one he drew above is the movie cover while the one below is a scene on top of the plateau where the Paradise Falls is found. Like his Kuya Sean, Andre is really talented. I couldn't be more proud. Take a look.

Drawn from below version

The midget out of Lego or the floor version out of Megablocks.

The 3D version he made in 2009.

A grander version he made just recently mixing Lego with styro balls.

And a whole bunch of random sketches.

Meet the Lego artist

If I'm not mistaken, this the first time I am going to introduce my lego artist - Sean, my eldest son. He's 10 but he started creating those lego transformers and other characters  back when he was only 6 years old. One of my favorites that he created is the Optimus-Jetfire union. The simple Wall-e he did was also cute. The liger (combination of lion and tiger) was really awesome. He still continues to amaze me and his dad until now. We're so proud of him, he did it all without any pattern, just pure imagination.
I'm sharing again some of his most recent works. One is a land rover, a mammoth, and his version of Demolishor from the movie Transformers. There were others before but sadly I was not able to photograph them.

Boredom buster: Paint!

Kids' Artworks Captured

The only way to make your kids' artworks- paintings, sketches, drawings, last a lifetime is by creating soft copies of them, photographing them, so even when they'll get torn or lost or thrown in the trash in the future, which is very likely, you will still have a copy. They also make great additions to your scrapbooks and photo albums.

Make sure to load them up to the archive of your kids' mementos - photos and videos. And don't forget to keep a back-up. In this day and age, one should always produce a back-up, nothing is certain coz it's almost impossible to make our computer crash-proof.And we don't want to regret losing fun memories because of some technical failures.

But still, I suggest that we don't forget to keep the originals in some place safe. The kids would really love to see these when they grow up and they would thank us parents for keeping their works.

Above: Artworks of my kids: Andre, 4 and Sean, 8

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