So I was wandering around Senayan City waiting for my mom two days ago. I went to my usual waiting place – bookstore. The only bookstore in Senayan City was Toko Gunung Agung. This bookstore is quite rare actually and I guess it’s the only store I found in Jakarta. They don’t have much collections on English books and the price is more expensive than even Kinokuniya (I wonder).

Anyway, I couldn’t find any books interesting so I turned to stationary corner. And I stopped at the art area. This corner is my favourite after the book area because I could see lots of art equipment from crayons, acrylic paints, watercolour, oil paints, in all colours, and sketch books and canvases. Then I found this tiny box. It turned out to be a collection of watercolour in blocks with various colours and brush. The first time I saw this was when I was in Kinabalu High School where my Korean friend brought a box of watercolour and I had been searching for this box forever but couldn’t find any. So when I found this I immediately bought it without thinking twice.

There are 3 kinds of watercolour box collection with different number of colours – 12, 18 and 24 colours. I bought the 24 colours because it was on discount (this girl can never refuse discount). Here’s what it looks like:

Inside the box you’re gonna have 24 blocks of different colours and you just need to water it a bit with the brush to make the paint. Here’s the interesting one. The brush provided from the box looks like a syringe where you could fill it with water. When you fill it with water, you can press the brush and a dollop of water will come out at the tip of the brush. So you don’t need to water your brush separately like normal brushes and you can actually adjust how much water you want to let out by the pressure you put on the brush.

I tried the paint on a paper and it turned out great. I’m not an expert at watercolour but I guess for a starter it was not bad. Here’s my first painting. I tried to paint Elsa from the movie Frozen but only the silhouette.

I always like the way watercolours blend. Unlike acrylic or oil paint where you can be generous, you have to be careful on the ratio of paint and water to get the colour you want. Furthermore you can’t put many layers on the paper because it will drench the paper. I guess I still need more practice on using this box but so far I’m quite satisfied of the result :)

Cheers,

Medina

I’ve had this blog since 2010 but I rarely post anything. There’s only 66 posts total after 4 years. So let’s start fresh. When I first set up this blog I planned to write anything special happening around me – hence I called it Special Circumstances. Let’s be honest, nothing so special occurred to me in the last 4 years other than I had boyfriend for 3 years and we broke up in 2013. Ground-breaking. The rest of it was just a typical life flow; four years of study then had a job. Everything is ordinary except the one that is happening in my head. Well you know how brain works. It exaggerates everything.

Sometimes my brain can be really bizarre and I often get headache because I overthink, and not all of them is positive. Sometimes it’s just full of ideas or shit. It happens everyday for as long as I remember and I kept thinking I need to transfer these stupid silly crazy things off of my head. So I decided I should start blogging again. Not just an ordinary daily diary but I should put stupid stuff too. That should do the trick. So that’s why I changed my blog name from not-so-extraordinary Special Circumstances to the silly What Crosses My Mind.

I wish you would have smiled in the bakery
Or sat on a tatty settee
At some mutual friends gathering 
And the more you keep on looking the more it's hard to take
Love, we're in stalemate
To never meet is surely where we're bound
There's one in every town
Just there to grind you down

I wish I would have seen you in the post office
Or maybe I did and I miss it
To busy with a mind on clever lines
Why not the rounder's pitch or the canteen?
You're slacking love where have you been?
Just had to go and wait until tonight

So give me the invite
Don't worry it's alright

I wish I have seen you in the arcade
Sipping on a lemonade
In the paper cup and chewing on the straw
And I wish I'd seen you in the bakery
But if I'd seen you in the bakery
You probably wouldn't have seen me

Arctic Monkeys - The Bakery

"I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own" - Marianne, Sense and Sensibility

"My desire to live is bigger than my imagination"

"Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones." - Jane Eyre

It's a nice thing if every food we eat comes with nutritional facts