Ranunkel, Ranunkel, let down your hair...

One of my favorite spring flowers is Persian buttercup.

The red Persian buttercups are something between red poppies and red roses. They have the pasionate look and the velvet touch of red roses. However, their stems and buds are slightly hairy and the beautifully sharp contrast between their blood-red petals and midnight-black pistils remind me of red poppies in summer.

The German name of Persian buttercup is Ranunkel. It sound quite similar to "Rapunzel" to me. Have you ever heard of "Rapunzel", a German fairy tale in the collection assembled by the Brothers Grimm, telling a story of a young, beautiful woman with very long, golden hair, who is imprisoned in a tower in the middle of the woods? Since my little girl is a fairy of red Persian buttercups, she doesn't have golden, but black hair, which goes better with the color red.

Ranunkel, Ranunkel, let down your hair...

This is how the drawing was made step-by-step:

And ta-da, the final outcome! 

Birthday Princess

I celebrated my Birthday greatly with my close friends on Tuesday. A friend of mine reserved a table at a Chinese hotpot restaurant. Because it was Tuesday, the restaurant was empty, when I came in. I felt special, as if my friends had reseved the whole restaurant for me. 

Every year on my birthday I miss my Mum so much. I wish she was by my side and we would cook something and eat at home like we used to do, when I was younger.

I believe, it doesn't matter, how old I am, I am always a little princess to my Mum and every year on my birthday she will surprise me with an unique present - her love but always in a very different way.

To my Mum: 

Thank you for loving me unconditionally!

 

To my friends:

Thank you for making my birthday a sweet one!

 

The magic of cherry blossom

All my exams are over. It's now time to draw again.

I made the sketch for this watercolor several days ago while learning for the last exam of this semester. What a relief hearing the sound of pencils scratching on paper! I always wonder, why some people disklike this wonderful scratching sound so much. It sounds so beautiful and promising, much nicer than the scratching sound of chalk on a blackboard or a knife on a plate. I assume, that is the sound of an idea.

I'm very sure, spring has arrived safe and sound. The sun shines again. Birds are tweeting merrily. Eagerly numerous flower buds are longing for blooming. And I feel the fragrance of love in the air. 

One of my favorite moments of spring is the blooming of cherry blossoms. The moment is just like magic.

The first signs of Spring

Spring is coming back, I saw the first signs of this return several days ago. 

Snowdrops (Galanthus) are now found at every corner in the garden, and as usual they are modest, but lovely in their appearance. 

This drawing is very small, only 8 x 10,5 cm, done by me with watercolor and colored pencils, my favorite artistic media to celebrate this happy event. 

And they lived happily ever after

My cousin, with whom I grew up and shared beautiful childhood memories, got married to his high school sweetheart at the end of December, three days before Christmas.What a brave decision to celebrate the wedding in such stressful time! 

Two months before the ceremony, he asked me for designing his wedding invitations. I felt touched for being asked. The invitation design will be a small present of mine to celebrate a new chapter in his life, since "we can do no great things; only small things with great love". I wish him all the best for the future.

This is how the official invitations and the other two options look like. 

The taste of Christmas

Christmas is over, but the warm memories of Christmas still leave a delicious taste on my tongue and melt in my mouth. Yummy!!!

Grilled pork filet served with Duchess potatoes and mushroom cream sauce - Noodle salad with surimi - Smoked salmon - Pickle grilled sweet pepper - Leberkäse - Oven baked chicken legs - Kimbap with marinated beef - Minced raw pork with onion 

Sketches Home-Sweet-Home

I stayed at home in Vietnam for nearly four weeks from September to October this time. It was great to see Mum again after a long time apart. I often come back home on Christmas holidays to escape from freezing European winter days and because it's silly to face Christmas alone without surrounding myself with family and friends.

Mum is not only a gourmet but also a good cook. Staying at home with her means cozy atmosphere, good meals and healthy food.

I love to sketch food. While drawing I tried to remember how delicious the dishes looked like when they were served in front of me, how enticing they smelled and of course how their delicate taste melted on my tongue. These memories make me so happy and feel deeply grateful for what I got in life. 

Arabian-style dinners on the plane back home in Sai Gon:

Mum's lovely pets:

 

Dinners like a King at home:

Grilled Meat on Rice Noodles (Bún thịt nướng của mẹ) - One of my favorite things I love from my mum's cooking

Sushi and Sashimi at Tokyo Deli in Saigon: Salmon belly, herring fish roe sashimi, sliced octopus with wasabi and broiled eel nigiri.

Traditional dishes from Hue, the old imperial capital of the Nguyen dynasty- the last dynasty in Vietnam

 Keep this quote in my mind:

“No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” – Lin Yutang

Forest animals

One year has passed since I made my typography paper cut "Cras numquam scire". 
This is the first paper cut I made this year. It is supposed to be a birthday gift for a friend's father, who turned 75 years old this year and adores the art of cutting paper designs. I finished the paper cut one day before my trip to Strasbourg, France. 
Someone told me, the paper cut brought back his childhood memories of watching the TV series "The Animals of Farthing Wood", based on a book of the same title written by Colin Dann. What a coincidence!

Lost in a cloud of butterflies

Last summer, I purchased a book named "Gioconda " by British writer Lucille Turner, an excellent historical fiction of Leonardo da Vinci's life. I love the way the book opens inside the mind of the solitary boy Leonardo roaming the countryside, being fascinated by mechanics of butterflies, watching rivers to see exactly how water moves, collecting dead animals to dissect.

"A small boy knee deep in meadow flowers of humming violet, blazing white, is lost in a cloud of butterflies. He holds out his net,..., and waves it through the air, making eddies and currents but catching only sunlight. He flies this way and that, chasing wings that do not want to be caught, until finally he gives up, sits on a clump of moss and watches the stream instead...Time for another approach, he thinks. Let the butterfly come to you. He sits still and waits..."

Immediately after reading these sentences, I began to make a sketch of a small boy standing in the middle of a wild flower meadow and observing a lek of colorful butterflies dancing in the air. For some inexplicable reason I didn't feel like finishing the drawing and just left it undone until yesterday.