Something New for 2018!

With the new year just around the corner, we're always trying out new products for our Garden Shop and one of our latest ideas is hand-painted aprons! We're also looking into regular-sized tea towels as well as smaller ones and table napkins which can be framed and hung up just like regular hand-printed pictures or paintings.

Here's a look at one of the aprons we tried painting! 

We also have the following types of art and craft classes for kids and adults  at our Outreach Office every Saturday from 1pm to 4pm -

Printing With Fresh Leaves (on fabric products)

Simple Freeform Chinese Painting (on fabric products)

If you're interested, give us a call or email us for an appointment.

ESOL Nature Walk

We had a group of lovely Years 2, 3 and 4 kids come over on Wednesday for a Garden Walk. The Walk was conducted by our Treasurer, Mr Tajul Arosh Baroky, who took the kids via the bamboo garden route from our Outreach office. 

Arriving promptly at 9.30am, the kids assembled in our office garden and quickly went off on their walk in single file. The focus of their morning's adventure was learning about the ecology of the trees and plants in the Gardens as well as the creatures that live in them. 

Walking under the bamboo was an interesting experience for the kids, expecially when they found out bamboo was a kind of grass and not a tree.

 

Unfortunately, the back route to the Gardens was closed for maintenance work so the route had to be changed to include a meander through the formal garden before heading up towards the lily pond. There were few monkeys to be seen while walking along the road but once the kids reached the pond, there were monkeys waiting to entertain them! 

Hard to say who entertained whom, actually, as the curious monkeys seemed equally fascinated by the children.

It was just a short 90-minute walk as the kids were too young to attempt a longer excursion but the kids learned a lot about things like how even cutting down a single tree affects all the creatures that live in it, from the ants and insects under and around the roots to those that make their homes up in its topmost branches. 

We're really looking forward to seeing the ESOL boys and girls again next holiday as they asked intelligent questions about the things they were shown in the field.

Budding Artist 30.11.17

Guess who drew this little masterpiece? You'll never believe who painted this! Scroll down to read about this morning's 1-hour art lesson and find out the identity of our latest artist!

This week's post is a couple of days early as the regular Saturday demonstration at the Garden Shop might have to be called off due to the rainy weather. However, we were lucky enough to have a really talented budding artist drop by at our Outreach office today. 

Our regular volunteer member, Ms Ch'ng Saw See, brought her grandniece Natalie Goh around for a holiday art lesson this morning. Natalie is a sweet little girl who picked up the first basic stroke of our easy-to-learn free-style Chinese brush painting technique very quickly and after just fifteen minutes of practice on paper, she was ready to go on to paint her own T-shirt.

With a little help, Natalie who's on holiday in Penang, was taught the beginnings of composition and how to place her brush strokes in various positions to form a painting. Using just the simplest dab-and-lift brush stroke, Natalie put in the flowers and buds before we changed her brush and colour for the leaves. Once the basic composition was done, all our in-house artist had to do was add the tiny brown stems and little leaves (using the same dab-and-lift technique) to complete the picture for her. No other touching up was required. 

Just in case anyone's wondering, Natalie is only 4-years-old!

If you are interested in learning how to paint in the Chinese free-form style or your children would like to learn, we have regular art classes for children and adults at our Outreach office opposite the Moon Gate every Saturday from 1pm to 4pm. To make painting fun and easy to learn for everyone, we have a simple curriculum teaching just 4 basic types of the most commonly used strokes for painting flowers, fish and birds.

We have T-shirt printing classes for kids and adults, using local leaves and flowers, too. We also teach a combination of printing and painting for a really fun and interesting way of decorating T-shirts, bags and other useful things.

For more information about our art and craft lessons and programmes, don't hesitate to call our Outreach office.

Straits International School 10.11.17

Two classes of Year 5 students from Straits International School paid us a visit yesterday. They were here with their teachers for a Seed Safari and Seed Collage activity. The boys and girls were very well-behaved and smart, too. Many of them asked intelligent questions and offered well-reasoned answers when asked questions about plants, seeds and flowers.

The Straits International students arrived promptly in their big bus at 9.30 and were quickly organised into their respective classes for attendance checking. As they were a big group, half the boys and girls went off on their Seed Safari with our president, Dr. Liew Kon WUi, and our Treasurer, Mr. Tajul Arosh Baroky. They collected specimens of flowers, leaves and seeds to use on their collages when they returned to our Oureach office at the end of the Safari.

It was a warm morning in spite of our recent rainy weather, so the kids took their water bottles with them. Their Safari included the Formal Garden at the Penang Botanic Gardens and they came back with colourful specimens which they had picked off the ground there.

The second group stayed back to work on their collages first, with the other volunteer members of the Society. They were given palettes f seeds, cut citronella leaves and flowers to paste into their collages. They spent a happy hour working on their masterpieces before being taken for a quick tour of our Outreach office back garden where they had the opportunity to observe various kinds of herbs, beans and medicinal flowers growing.

Here's a look at some of the pieces done by the students at our Outreach office during their outing at the Botanical gardens. 

We have many children and adults' programmes at Outreach, from various kinds of walks and excursions to painting and art & craft activities. Don't forget to get in touch with us if you'd like to know more!

Bag Painting 4 Nov 2017

We've been invited to demonstrate simple T-shirt painting and printing at the KDU WHY RACE event at M Mall on Saturday 18th November 2017 from 9am onwards. We'll be selling our hand-printed and painted bags and T-shirts at the event, too, so don't forget to come and watch.

Our members have been busy printing and painting extra bags and T-shirts for the event and we're all looking forward to interacting with the members of the public who have never seen these activities before,

One of the things we always try to do is to include the local, English and scientific names of the plants we paint or print in a simple Western form of calligraphy. 

We also have regular T-shirt and bag printing and painting at our Outreach office every Saturday from 1pm to 4 pm. If you're interested, give us a call or email us for an appointment.

Finishing with Glamour Oct 28 2017

Sometimes T-shirts need a little bit of touch up to make the colours or the design stand out and look more striking so the last demonstration was on touching up some T-shirts that needed a bit of pop. That's when contour fabric paste is most useful. You can get them in many colours, including both metallic as well as glitter combinations.

The grey T-shirt on the right presented an interesting challenge as the lady who ordered it was quite specific about not wanting colours that were too strong. The problem was that delicate pastels look very faded against a dove grey background. So the solution was to use black contour paste to outline everything and make the colours stand out against it.

The T-shirt on the left had a strong red and green design but it needed a bit of glamour to make it more versatile for both casual as well as party wear, so it was slashed with silver glitter contour paste to look like falling rain. The silver contour paste was slightly smeared in long streaks to give softer contours to the glittery paste.

If you'd like to learn more about fabric painting or printing and other art and craft projects, don't forget we have classes for kids and adults every Saturday from 1pm to 4pm.

Deepavali Demo 18 October 2017

Wishing all our Hindu members and friends a bright and colourfully joyous Deepavali!

This morning's demonstration at the Botanical Gardens was on how to use local leaves to print a specific design. As it was Deepavali, a peacock design was chosen for the occasion. Porterweed leaves (Stachytarpheta indica Jamaicensis) and stems were used to make up the peacock's body and tail.

It was a busy morning at the Gardens, with many families taking advantage of the sunny weather to enjoy a family outing and there were many children watching the demonstration. Perhaps due to the large crowds around the Botanika Shop, the usual furry friends were nowhere to be seen so the demonstration went off peacefully and without  any funny incidents.

The largest leaf was used to print the peacock's body first before the stems were printed in a radiating fan shape on which smaller leaves could be arranged to make up the tail feathers. A mainly blue and green colour scheme was chosen for the design. When all the shapes had been printed, gold and silver glitter was added to highlight the peacock's body, eyes, crest and tail feathers. 

If you're interested to learn more about printing with leaves or would like your children to learn a simple but valuable craft which they can use to decorate their own T-shirts at home, don't forget that we have classes for printing and painting at our Outreach office from 1pm to 4.30pm every Saturday.