watercolor tulips and leaves

painting

Painted these two watercolors the other day. It was hard to photograph them both without getting the colors wrong, so here are separate photos of each one:

I’ve been playing around with Adobe Illustrator lately, so I used it to make these leaves into a pattern. I’ve never done this before, so it took me a couple hours to get everything right, but I think it turned out pretty cool. Here’s a photo of how it looks on leggings and pillows in my Society6 shop:

I also like the phone cases:

Sketchbook patterns

drawing, sketchbook

Here are two of my latest sketchbook spreads:

Somewhere in the middle of one of these pages I suddenly realised that I use the same process for drawing this kind of patterns as I do while preparing lesson plans (I teach Mandarin Chinese). I put together different kinds of class activities, and then I step back and look if the overall picture is balanced. Then I think something like “there’s too much listening in a row, l should add some reading” and it’s the same as “there is too much triangles here, it would be better to add some lines or circles”.

I’ve never thought of this before, but it seems that I mostly think of my lesson plans in terms of pattern-like balance and compositional beauty, instead of just what is useful for my students’ learning process.