May
Laid-back Seletar, For how long?
If you remember my January post, there was something about sketching houses around the camp. Well, I have been doing that, in between experimenting with various printmaking techniques.
I have been using mostly pen and ink, pencil and watercolour. Although the first 2 techniques are often referred to a “sketching”, the drawings can be as polished as a full-colour painting. Those 3 techniques I use to “see” the houses better. Strictly speaking, a house is the same as an apple or a nude. So, how come I don’t see it? If I did, I am sure I could produce as colourful a picture as those apples and bodies. In the meantime, I am just posting one picture, drawn from my dining table and patio. A great place to paint and draw from. So, these are still experiments. As I get more satisfied with the results, I am hoping to use pastels to splash the colours of the sun on these houses – they are hardly ever white after all! I do not want to spoil your surprise by giving you a preview before the drawings are complete – you have to come to the studio and/or commission your own painting!
For those impatient to see what kind of images of Seletar architecture I come up with (in both the map overlay project and the sketching of houses project), I am uploading images of Flora and Fauna I have painted/ drawn for Postcards from Seletar (last September):
- the Pencil Drawings
- the Watercolours.
These images have been published in a notebook, available from the Singapore Museum Shops and Select Books in Singapore. It is also available from me, or from Postcards from Seletar.
Isabelle Desjeux 
Hey Isabelle – I was with the Banyan Tree folks yesterday, and they were interested in the technique you used for the map. In addition to the pencil sketches and watercolours, your approach to capture the residential zone, and the ‘man in the map’ also have an interesting story, no? puni