Happy Halloween

I hope you are all having a wonderful weekend. This was an older illustration that I created for Kids' Night Halloween poster from last year. I forgot this existed until last week when I mistakenly opened an old folder and clicked on the file. I enjoy finding random things, it's like discovering treasures from the past. Below is the poster from our recent Trick-or-Treat night. It's not my favorite but I had to do something fast and easy. Maybe, I should've used the mummy....Happy Halloween everyone!

Where there is no imagination there is no horror.
~Arthur Conan Doyle, Sr.

Out with the Old, In with the New!

I was perusing old photographs and I found these pictures from my Senior Project. Before we could graduate high school, we had to do a final project in order to pass. There was no limit on the subject, you could do whatever you wanted as long as it was tangible. I chose to do a comic book since I was a comic book fanatic back then. I still enjoy comic books; however, I'm not as invested on them as before. Below is a collage of characters of my final project.


My Art teacher, Ms. Singer entered my project in the Visual Communication category and won third place. And she also nominated me to be in "Who's Who Among American Students" which was a great honor even though I didn't win anything but a free book. I was not big on competition and never considered my work exceptional but for some reason my teachers thought I was good enough to represent them and the school. I owe them a big thank you for encouraging and believing in me. Without them I would've never realized my potential. So, those are my old work and here are some new ones:

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Show and Tell

Happy Fall everyone! My schedule has been a little hectic lately and I haven't had time to write. I wish I could go on a mini vacation before the holidays...Anyway, I just want to write a follow up post about the mushroom which I forgot to mention in the previous article. I hope no one went mushroom hunting recently. So here's the deal. Before you cook your mushrooms, have warm salt water ready and soak the mushrooms for 30 minutes to get rid of unwelcome hitchhikers, then you can prepare it however you want. There you go, I hope I didn't forget anything else.

Whew! Now that's done, I can move on to a more exciting story. Well, I met a little girl named Lucy, she's four and loves to draw. I have been very lucky to receive some of her artwork including school projects and I want to share them with you.



How cute are they? I just love kids art! They are so free and expressive. They don't care about negative and positive space or if the colors are in harmony, all they care is having a crayon or pencil in hand and a piece of paper to record their thoughts.


I found this one in the folder where I put all the kids' artwork. I'm not sure who owns this masterpiece but if I had to take a guess, it's probably Ayame's, my goddaughter. I hope these inspire some of you to draw even when you don't think you're good enough to sketch a circle. Drawing should be unconstrained and enjoyable – something that we all need to relearn.

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?"
~Howard Ikemoto