Paint it Black

Now that exams are over and I finally have a breather, and ignoring the fact that I have a magazine to compile and design, I decided that I had the time to finally decorate the apartment the way I want.

Michelle went out with Daryl the other day and found some cheap painting canvases at Lincraft (some store similar to Spotlight, but cheaper, for those at home). She had plans to paint the Chinese character for her surname in gold on a square, black, textured background. So I told her to buy me an A2-sized one for something I wanted to paint for my bedroom. When she got home, my canvas was smaller than I had imagined so I was stuck on what to do with it.

The next day, after yet another meeting about the Publications department with the International Students Committee, I went to Lincraft at Carousel with Michelle and I literally went crazy. I didn't think I missed painting that much but I obviously do. I bought two more small canvases to compliment the one I had at home and a huge A1-sized one. I had so many ideas running through my head at the time I was getting overtly excited when it came to choosing paint colours. In the end, I stuck with black, white and red because that was what we had planned for the house from the beginning. Blame our Chinese roots or just Michelle's obsession with red but I love those colours with a passion.

They compliment our dinnerware anyway:


I've always had this idea to create messages in different languages for each room or area of the house, so i went with it. Here's what I managed to come up with yesterday; the message "park (your arse) here" in Spanish for above the couch, and the Chinese character for "eat" for the dining area. Michelle and I plan to put "thinking room" in Malay in the toilet.

So here's the final panel of 3 pieces that make up the message for the couch. I painted the square canvas a rough, stripey red but left the other two white so that the words would stand out more. Notice how the too-small A2-sized canvas has now been used for "estacione":


I wanted to mount them up with about a ¾-inch space between canvases but I need to get my landlord to drill the holes for that. So doing it the cheap & easy way, I taped the canvases together with small wooden pieces for splints to hold them together and voila! I think they still work well stuck together for now:


This is how they look above my couch, hanging from that single screw that my landlord put in for us when we first moved in:


Now on to the dining room. I used the huge canvas to replace the awfully old-fashioned painting of Chinese junks on a river that our landlords had put up previously. As proposed, I painted the Chinese word "chi" on a bright red background with glossy black acrylic:


So it now sits above our dining table. We think it looks good and makes the right type of impact. The red makes you hungry though:

Photos hosted by: www.flickr.com

Tell us what you think!
And HAPPY 24th BIRTHDAY, SHEEDA!