Pumpkins and Peacocks

My peacock costume for Halloween! I bought the fabrics and materials and somehow pulled it together for a dress, and in the nick of time! I had no sewing machine so I had to hand sew the hem at the bottom, and somehow got the back to work. I had too much fun in this costume, and wished I could wear it every day!

Some friends and I went to a pumpkin patch a couple weeks before Halloween. I decided to carve images into my pumpkin that represent my apartment since there's three of us living here. You can obviously tell which one is me - it's my dog, Yoori, and I watching the sunset. I drew my brother's for him, the Tigers logo, but he decided to carve it and did an awesome job because I had failed to realize that the logo would just fall out if I actually carved it the way I drew it. See the little stilts he carved so that it could be suspended? Snazzy, huh? And, for Daniel, I drew the Canon logo since he loves taking pictures. He didn't want to carve it, though, so I just did a quick, rough job of carving it since I was tired of carving at that point. Man, who knew it was so exhausting carving pumpkins? At least we made some yummy pumpkin bread and garlic roasted pumpkin seeds out of them!

1st Cake Topper

Thanks to Howard, a random fellow artist I met in LA, I got a chance to experiment with a new medium - Sculpey (or Polymer) clay. This stuff ROCKS my SOCKS! It never dries out and bakes perfectly (without a kiln!)

So, I was sitting at home staring at this clay that Howard gave me as a gift (two days before I had to head down to Haemin and Howard's (different Howard) wedding in LA). Suddenly, I came up with an idea to make a cake topper as a gift for the happy couple. Since I was handling all the flowers, including floral decoration of the cake, at the wedding, I knew they didn't have a cake topper yet. So, I thought I'd give it a shot, and if worse comes to worst, I could just place it on their table as a standing figurine. The end result was more than I ever imagined! The picture above is before I fully finished it, but it was such a nice shot (courtesy of Daniel Lee), I had to put it in.

I had never really sculpted before, so the whole process was an adventure! It was fun coming up with alternative methods, especially when I didn't have the right tools. Like, at one point, I was smacking the clay with a wooden rice spatula I found to flatten it out. My brother looks over and says "Heyy... that's my spatula. I got it as a gift." And, I laughed and said, "Heyy.. thanks!" as I proceeded to slap the clay.






















This was one of my absolute favorite details. I wanted the shoes to have texture similar to real shoes, so I ran over to the pile of shoes in our apartment, found a pair of my brother's actual converse, and rolled it over the clay to make the treads for the clay converse. It worked great!














Here, I was fooling around with different hairstyles for Howard before actually making his hair. It was quite entertaining.

This was the quick sketch I did before starting the models. I started with the idea on the left, then changed it because the faces looked too flat and expressionless. I also didn't want to make arms, so I was initially going to make them arm-less figurines.








For a final touch, I called up my friend, Jiun, who can create custom-made earrings, and asked her to make a pair of earrings for the figurine. I left her ears pierced so that it might be easier for Jiun to get the earrings through.

Unfortunately, it ended up being much more difficult than I had anticipated because of the fragile nature of the doll. Jiun sat for 6 hours just trying to thread and build the earrings. 6 hours!!! She did an amazing job!

My picture below sucks because the earrings themselves are out of focus.


Here is a final shot of the bride and groom, and the cake topper. Do you see the likeness?

It was eery how much they looked alike, considering I had only a vague idea of what their dress and hair was going to look like.













Here's the gift, all wrapped pretty and ready to be opened!



















Finally, here is the teary-eyed bride that made all the work worth it.

1st Time Wedding Flowers!

My friend, Haemin, commissioned me to do ALL her flowers for this past August at her Los Angeles wedding. You may think.. hey.. no big deal. But, being that this was my very first time ordering and arranging flowers, it was a HUGE deal. I had no idea what I was getting myself into!

Needless to say, the flowers were a big success, and most importantly, Haemin was happy about them to the point of tears (which, I guess, doesn't say much since brides cry a lot, as you'll see in my next post). I have to give a gimongoid shout-out to Caroline Nguyen, without whom none of this would have been possible. She's the flower guru who gave me all her wisdom, ideas, and time from her own past experiences to help me get going and get through with this huge project. You're the BEST Caroline!




(All above pictures are from Peter Park Photography)

This is my AMAZING floral team who worked tirelessly day and night in order to see this thing through. These girls made the experience so enjoyable! I was so lucky to have some crafty hands to help me out as well as persevering spirits that did all they could to keep the energy level up! Sue, Jiun, Angela, Carol, Emily.. I'm forever grateful to you. (Oh, gotta give a shout-out to Monica too, who helped me with pre-prep! She designed the gorgeous invitations!)

Tear-Jerker

For Christmas, I choreographed a dance routine and put together a movie for my students' performance. They performed to the song, Grown-up Christmas List, by Amy Grant in front of the entire school. Fellow staff, parents, and even children were in tears when the performance was over. The words of the song are moving, and on the movie, the students had written out their "grown-up" wishes to Santa for Christmas. If you understand the background of my students, you would know why their wishes pierce the heart. I will try to put a live clip of that up here when I get a chance.

These pictures were taken on the last day of school. As a surprise for the kids, I played the performance clip from Christmas time, which most of them had not seen yet. My desk was behind them, so it was cute to secretly watch them from behind, and see some of them slowly get up one at a time as they watched, and start doing the motions all over again. They were so proud of that day, as I was of them. The second picture is when they realized I was watching and taking pictures.

Fun with 4th Graders

As some of you know, my school did not have full time staff for any of the non-core subjects. So, it was up to me to come up with some kind of curriculum for my students in art, music, PE, computers, etc. I was at first overwhelmed at the idea, but gradually came to embrace it since I got a chance to teach students the things I enjoyed as well. Who knew I'd have my own mini-volleyball teams one day? ...or my own mini-choir/dramatics/dance team? I definitely went to town with those!

Here are a couple art projects we did. The first, Scribblimagination, came from a game I played with my friend, Matt, at Tampa Urban Project in Florida. The game was simple. You draw any old scribble, hand it over to your friend, and they create something from that scribble. This may sound dull to some, but I thought it was so entertaining! I loved doing this with my students since kids have the craziest imaginations!

This was one of my favorite, by Felicia. It looks like a fish is jumping out of the water to devour a dog (The green is the original scribble). Awesome.

Another project I came up with started from a drawing assignment I had in my drawing class at Rochester Adams High School with Mr. Brooks. He was one scary teacher, and most students didn't like him.  Even still, he always believed in me and my abilities. Thanks Mr. Brooks! I will try to do something with what I have!

So, in his class, we had to draw and then finish a picture completely out of dots. I made a picture of Kramer from Seinfeld and gave it to my close friend as a gift. That was the only project I ever finished for that class. I'm proud of the picture and will scan it in once I find it.

I ended up assigning the same project to my 4th graders and they blew me away. I went into the project hesitant since I had done this as a high school upperclassman, but I figured 4th graders could make dots. Since Seurat had also made pictures out of dots, I made an extra lesson out of it, and we learned about the color-infused paintings of Seurat as inspiration for the start of the project.

Here's some of the best work from the kids.