Happy New Year everyone! 2018 was an interesting year, with highlights such as being in the middle of Times Square in New York (more about that later!), a new arrival in the family for us all to coo over, and some seriously good times with good food!
I’m looking forward to a few things already this year, and it will be interesting to see what it brings!
Wishing you all a great year (and happy dietings!)
Happy (belated! Okay, three weeks late) New Year guys!
I’ve been MIA for a little while, mostly because I wanted to switch off and take a break from blogging. And also because I got a little addicted to binge-watching Netflix series and posting on Instagram, so generally being fairly productive. But at the back of my mind there’s a little nagging voice that’s been telling me to go and update my blog, so here I am pretending I was here all along 🙂
I also wanted to spend some time gathering my ideas – I am definitely starting to go towards the trend of quality posts over quantity (this pretty much applies to most things in my life) and I’m seeing so many new niches, ideas and dialogues which I’m finding inspiring. So watch this space, I’ve already been doodling and drafting posts at work whenever I’m struck by an idea, so hopefully there’s some pretty interesting content coming soon.
So even though I’m a little late in posting, here’s wishing you all a productive, beautiful new year, with something a little different to inspire you everyday : )
Here’s a few pieces I worked on recently, I wanted to use some metallic silver or gold pens on these to add a little sparkle but didn’t find a decent enough pen to use unfortunately. I love drawing miniatures (plus I find them easier than larger scale pieces, usually because I end up drawing everything out of proportion!) and thought I’d mix up some watercolour backgrounds with silhouettes. I’ve done a couple more but didn’t love those, so here are my three favourites.
I’m trying to push myself to practise, practise, practise more of my pen lines, so fingers crossed I’ll be posting more soon! Let me know what you think, and which you like most : )
I’ve been doing a little sketching nearly every day to make the most of my free time, and I’m loving the creating feeling I’ve been getting (even if half of what I’ve been drawing is stickmen and wonky flowers). I’ll be posting some of my pictures soon, but here’s one of my sketches in progress – I’ve still not coloured it in yet because I’m torn between using watercolours and pens.
Happy weekendings all!
Happy New Year everyone, I hope it’s a beautiful one for you all!
Can you believe it’s that time already? I’m not really one to make resolutions at the New Year, but one thing I have resolved to do more of is drawing and painting, which I have neglected, and I took the chance on the first day of 2016 to play around with colouring pencils, pens, felt tips and water colours – here is one of my results below. I love the different media and colours I can mix and it’s always fun feeling like a child colouring in again (I think I need one of those grown up colouring books!)
So although I say it every year, I’ve come again full circle to make the most of my free time and see what I can come out with! What do you want to do differently this year?
I held a tea party for my sisters this weekend, and I’ve finally manage to sit down (and rest!) to post the results, which I was really pleased with. My sisters and I decided that for Eid this year, instead of giving everyone Eid presents we’d do Eid experiences – a day out, a picnic, a tea. I love my afternoon teas so decided to organise a themed afternoon tea for the girls.
I had a little difficulty deciding on a theme because I liked so many, and initially was going to just do a Mad Hatter’s tea party. But I do love my florals and we all love books, so I decided to work these into the look as well, which worked a lot better than I thought it would – I was worried it would look really messy and nonsensical. My eldest sister commented that it also reminded her of a colourful fair or festival, especially with the colourful bunting, and thankfully the guests all loved the results of the tea!
Here’s what the table looked like, and some of the desserts:
My favourite part of the decor and table were these – book-themed toppers for the cupcakes. I picked out a bunch of our childhood books so that we could enjoy a few fond memories of the books we used to love (including our first Urdu learning book!) – these were a hit with the ladies and I was glad I included these!
I had various things scattered around the room for display to implement all three themes – pastels and florals, book wallpapers, piles of books and a top hat with playing cards to tie the themes together, which I thought went wonderfully together, not to mention the ‘this way’, ‘that way’ and ‘wrong way’ arrows.
I’m sure you can tell that the most obvious theme was the Mad Hatter/Wonderland one – I loved the variety of decor which is out there and took the opportunity to scatter random quotes and prints around the table, as well as ‘drink me’, ‘eat me’ and ‘take me’ tags on the food and goody bags. I also ordered giant playing cards for us to play with, although it was quite funny to see how people would hide their cards!
My mum also lent me this beautiful tea set which was love at first sight for me, and very apt because it’s actually a Harlequin Tea Set! These were beautiful dainty tea cups in bright colours with matching sauces, which I put on display and thought really made the whole table (not to mention actually made the tea party an actual tea party!)
My nieces and nephews probably enjoyed themselves the most (you can see my nieces shouting and giggling through my letterbox below), although my sisters and sister-in-law had a lot of fun looking for the small touches around the room too, and putting on false moustaches, giant glasses and hats!
I was really worried about not having enough food on the day, so my menu was a little adventurous, surprisingly I managed to make more than I thought. Even better, the guests all brought some amazing food as well so we were all seriously stuffed and from red velvet cake, cupcakes, chocolate trifle, sandwiches, pizza, samosas, chicken bites and kebabs, to name but a few of the things we had laid out.
Having said that, my nieces were the first to run to the sweet table and run off giggling with sweets in their hands!
I had
It was an exhausting but fun afternoon, which was made better by the scorching sunny afternoon and the yummy ice-creams we finished off with. We were meant to play games but we felt pretty lazy and the cushions on the floor were pretty useful for us to laze about in!
It was really fun (and a little challenging) planning this tea party by myself, but I had fun doing it and also learned what I can make and what I can’t. I was really happy with the decorations I made, they took me a while (hence being quiet on the blogging front!) but I was really pleased with how it all came together.
So now I’m looking forward to the next Eid experience, and also more tea parties with different themes, which I’m already planning – I just need to recover from this one and I’ll be off again!
I had a lot of thoughts for this letter of the day (Knowledge, Kites, Koalas…) but I went for keys. Keys are such great symbols for so many things, and can be interpreted as many things (keyholes, freedom, magic…!)
I have a small obsession with intricately drawn keys, and have always wanted to try my hand at drawing some. The ones below are my first attempts and only took me a few minutes (which is why they’re not great) – I had a lot of fun with the colours, styles and mediums as well as comparing different shapes of keys as well. My favourite is the ink drawing of the keys with the wings, which reminds me of several things I’ve read about before, but I thought it would add a quirky addition!
I’ve been playing around with the ink function on my graphics tablet, and thought I’d try drawing some simple Chinese characters. I was surprised to find that although the strokes look a lot simpler to draw, they are a lot more difficult than they look! I had to re-do a lot of the lines after I made them until I got the hang of using bold, thick black strokes and direct them in the right angles.
Here’s my end result, I drew a few classic symbols with the translations underneath, that I liked because they were pretty universal. It’s made me want to try out a few drawings on paper with ink, but I’ll have to wait to buy some before I can try it out!
I’ve been busy lately ‘designing’ dresses (i.e. stealing pictures from the internet and putting them together) for the upcoming wedding, as well as doodling away different ideas that I’ve been having. This is one of my older pictures from doodling maxi dresses that I loved (the final outfit didn’t really look entirely like this, so much for accuracy, eh) – but I’ve been staring at pretty dresses for the last few weeks so thought I’d post this!
Happy weekendings all : )
A friend of mine (who blogs here!) is a big fan of Frieda Kahlo, and issued a challenge to all her friends online to draw her a Frieda Kahlo in their own interpretation. Here was my submission, which was a quick 20 minute piece I did on my drawing tablet, which I was quite pleased with (it helps that I have an excellent tablet!)
My Frieda was not intentionally meant to be a Eastern-inspired one, but I suppose with the lotus in her hair, the pale skin and red lips, not to mention the jade jewellery made it that way. It’s nice to draw something which lets me play around with different colours and brushes, and also doesn’t feel like a big project. I’m working on something else, which I’ll hopefully be posting as soon as it’s finished, but until then, happy holidayds/Easter/Bank Holiday weekend, and hope you ate lots of spherical and egg-shaped chocolates!
The Harlequin Tea Set 