The story behind these hands.

For Singaporeans, I believe all of you should recognise the machine pictured below.

For the rest, this photo you see here is of an ATM of a pretty popular bank here. And they have machines EVERYWHERE island-wide.

AND in that upper right hand corner, is a photo demonstrating how to use the machine..

And those are my hands. Yes, mine. 

Now let me backtrack a bit and explain how this all happened.

Earlier in the year, I received an email asking me if I would like to be a hand model in a project. Apparently someone at the company follow AiClay and noticed my hands as I was always using them as reference pictures in the photos of my works. I was so surprised and tickled that I actually got a hand model job due to my photos, and I agreed to the project because.. why not! 

Side-note: I always have to photoshop my hands on AiClay photos by the way, because I have moles on them. I clarified this with the company, that urmm my hands aren't really flawless. But they were okay with this, and still took me on for the project, go figure!

This is a photo I managed to snap during the few hours of travelling around Singapore shooting at various machines. There was a whole team of 5 people just shooting my hands, pretty amazing since I only expected ONE photographer maybe. It wasn't super easy to pose for these photos, since there were quite a few requirements that you wouldn't even think of! Like how my fingers should rest naturally, and how I can't block the numbers on the keypad, etc.

I didn't manage to take any more photos because well, my hands were busy! Ha..ha. ;)

So it took a few months for the photos to appear on the machines, and now you really can see my hands everywhere now! Though nobody really notices these little demonstration photos on the machines, but it's still quite cool. :)

Roast meat noodles - with a Dragon Nest twist.

This was made as part of the collaboration between Dragon Nest and AiClay. 

Players should be able to recognise the various characters infused in the food - like the tofu in the soup, the egg yolk etc. :) The hardest element to make was actually.. (make a guess!)

It was the cucumber slices. It took me pretty long to conceptualise and imagine cucumbers in the shape of the game character, guess I haven't seen much of cucumber slices cut in cute figures in real life.

Everything is handmade by me, and yes even the little chopsticks! 

Some pink eggs.

Polkadots. Simple, plain dots. 

That was what I decided to paint on the rest of the miniature Easter eggs.

Have to admit that this was a rather hastily-put together piece of work, as I spent too much time on the (fail) Easter egg with the swirls (look at photo before this) and it was getting closer to Easter weekend by the day. Just look what I had to use to fill up the mini table together with the basket of Easter eggs, Christmas decorations lol.

I hope you still like it though. :)

To everyone celebrating, happy Easter! 

To everyone else, hope you enjoyed the extra day of holiday! ♥

A fail easter egg.

So this is not your usual spring poster. 

And, it was quite a fail as well. I liked the egg the whole process of painting it blue, doodling the design, and then I absolutely HATED it when I started filling in the doodles.

I contemplated not putting up the last photo of the painted egg, but I decided I wanted to share even my failed works with you. It was my first time painting with acrylic paint on polymer clay, and it was pretty darn hard. It dried too quickly, was impossible to mix the exact same shade again, and I had a crappy paintbrush.

Finally, I decided to paint this instead.. (watch out for next photo!) :)

I'm awkward and here are some macarons.

Oh wow, my heart is bursting with joy when the comments for the previous entry started rolling in. How sweet are you guys, really! ♥ Totally affirmed my decision to continue blogging and sharing my works. :)

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Over the past few months, I've had the opportunity to work with 3 different filming teams, who had approached me to feature AiClay and my "interesting job". 

One of the filming team was from OMY.sg for the program Meet the Young Bosses, and wow that was a crazy quick filming session! It took no more than 2 hours for the interview and show-and-tell, and even post-filming editing was quick because THE EPISODE IS HERE!

So here you go - http://bit.ly/YExwsw
You can also click on the other icon just below the video to view another part of the episode. :)

I was supposed to speak in Chinese but found myself slipping back into English very often, and oh my how I cringed at all of my awkward pauses and stumbling over words. And please don't take whatever I said seriously, because I was simply blabbering anything that came to mind.

Would love it if you guys would put in your after-thoughts in the column below the video as well! ♥ As you can see I did some shameless advertising in the comments as I realised my URL wasn't that obvious in the write-up. ;)

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For the next photo, do this little imagining exercise with me. 

Stare at the smallest macaron shell in the first photo. Before you move on to the next photo, imagine how small it would be using your finger as reference. Then go on to the next photo to check if they were as small as you imagined them to be.

Don't cheat before you move on to the next photo! -wags finger.

So, how did it go? 

Let me know in the comments if the real deal was smaller/bigger than you expected! ♥

Noodles and Strawberries.

I'm sorry for the neglect, dear blog.

I gotta be honest, I got a tad disheartened by the lack of feedback I get on the blog as compared to AiClay's facebook page, and started using the latter to share my works instead. But yesterday, I chanced upon a comment (drats I can't remember where I read it), but it was about how she loved reading my blog and my heart just swelled with warmth.

So here I am, maybe it's more troublesome to leave comments on blog entries, or maybe there are really fewer people reading this. BUT it's okay, even if there's just ONE reader returning to this blog, I'm gonna keep it going.

Let's celebrate the revival of this blog with something very Asian and true to my heritage. Noodles, or 麵. 

It took me darn long to roll these strands of noodles out to the thickness I wanted and for them to be uniform. At least, it was fun assembling them on the plate.

This was for the collaboration between Dragon Nest and AiClay. Which is also the main topic for the last day of filming next Monday! I can't wait for 'it's a wrap!'. Maybe I should celebrate THAT by making a miniature sandwich wrap. -distracted.

Here we've got a miniature strawberry tart I sculpted during Show and Tell for the filming. Can't wait to see how the videographer filmed the segment when I was poking the little holes in the strawberries, the camera zoomed in pretty close to me that I knew.

Just a sneak peek at behind the scenes of filming. I promised the filmat360 team I wouldn't leak out too much, so this is all I can share.

This week will be my birthday weekend, so I'm hoping for an awesome one. Happy birthday to any March babies as well! ♥ Till next time!

Miniature fruit pendants!

I received a commission from US a few weeks ago for some apple pendants for Teachers' Day.

That made me google for dates and turns out different countries celebrate Teachers' Day on different days! I learn something new everyday.

Decided to take a quick photo of the miniature fruit pendants - there's the green and red apples and a mandarin orange. 

 
AND Taro the puppy just photobombing there. ;)

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An announcement, I'll be on holiday from tomorrow till 7th March. 

I'll still try to get a connection if I can and get back to emails, but for shop orders they will be tended to when I'm back! Thanks for your patience lovelies. ♥

AND there are still slots left for the Donut Necklace Workshop on 16th March Saturday! 

Email me ASAP if you would want a slot (or two!).

My mom has out-takes!

Remember THIS happened in September last year?

Now the trailer's finally out, along with some funny out-takes! The program's called Behind This Door, featuring interesting hobbies and lives in Singapore. It'll be on the Toggle website for a while before it gets rolled out on television. I'm at Episode 3.

http://www2.toggle.sg/behindthisdoor/episode3.html

Check it out to see my mom opening and closing the door for 13 times (!!!) and a sneak peek of my miniature gingerbread-in-making!

Note that the full episode will only be released on 15th March 2013, so check back in then!

Make your own Donut Necklace!

Here's the latest! 

The Donut Necklace Workshop is now postponed to Saturday, 16th March 2013!

More details shown in poster below.

 Register ASAP by emailing to buzz@aiclay.com ♥

This crafting project is wonderful for those who are first-timers in making miniature food. 

The donuts will be bigger and easier to work with compared to the regular miniature food, but still, you don't miss the fun in experimenting as you make your own decorations for the donut!

Hope to see you there on 16th March, join me for an afternoon of crafting! ♥

新年快乐 { miniature mandarin oranges }

Pretty exciting days ahead for us Chinese all over the world!
It is Chu Xi today, which is the last day before the Chinese New Year (fyi, Year of the Snake is coming!). So it's customary for us to bring pairs of mandarin oranges and present them to elders with CNY greetings on the first day of CNY, and receive angbaos in return.

Hence, here are some miniature mandarin oranges I've handsculpted.

Here's wishing all of you celebrating..

新年快乐！ 

Happy Chinese New Year! ♥

 *P.S The donut pendant workshop still has slots left, would you like to sign up? ♥ Details in workshop poster found here - http://www.flickr.com/photos/aiclay/8447071440/in/photostream