Another gift in the making

After the personalized office garden I prepared for the first colleague leaving, I am under pressure to give a personal touch to the next colleague leaving after him.

I have passed by the Paint By Numbers stall a couple of times, and was always tempted to get a set to try out. After all, I used to be a young art student before graduating from secondary school. I worked with poster and watercolors before, so how challenging can this cross-stitch-like coloring exercise be?

And so I ordered a kit for a cool, brown picture of coffee cups. My colleague is a coffee addict.

Now, it wasn't so easy to work with acrylic paint. Firstly, I haven't painted for more than a decade, I can't handle a brush right. Acrylic paint isn't at all like watercolor either. The coverage is great and hence corrections are possible, but the colors don't seem to blend as easily. The numbers were rather faint, so I squinted my eyes trying to distinguish between fives, sixes and eights.

However, it was much fun painting again. I recalled my days as the only member of my school's art club, the poster pieces I painted for the school canteen, and my CC's art teacher's constant nagging for me to keep my brushes clean to prevent muddiness.

Here was the half-done picture:

As it was acrylic, very little water was required. I could use the poster palette on its own. A piece of kitchen paper towel was sufficient too.




And now with all the colours in and a feeble attempt to blend the strangely green spots with the surrounding brown:





Now to complete the look, I painted the edges black, a suggestion I read off the web:





Ah, all ready to dry off during the night. I spent the entire afternoon working on this. The result was fulfilling. Now I wonder why I didn't pursue my artistic inclinations when I was younger. Why was there such a push to study hard for exams by dropping everything else?





Perhaps this will be a start of my revival of an old hobby: drawing. I had sketched recently, to little satisfaction. Maybe I should work with colors instead.

Hope the recipient will appreciate it. And hope I won't be tempted by selfishness to keep the piece to myself. :)

And to wrap it all up, here is how the original work looks like:




Wonder if a layer of gloss would make mine look more like the above.