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.