in the midst of spring cleaning!

i decided to finally tackle this arduous and formidable of cleaning up and organising my room, which is no mean feat when it looks like this:

ok this isn’t how it looks normally, it’s how it looked in the process.

walao this looks like a disaster zone. my mother never stops nagging at the mess in the room. not that i can blame her.. but hey i’m finally getting down to cleaning up this pig sty!

and my dog happily strutted in and plonked her fat butt amongst the huge mess.

it’s incredible how much junk we accumulate in our lives over a matter of years; old papers, textbooks, letters, un-used foolscap, half filled exercise books, magazines and the sort, many of which we just can’t bear to throw because it’s a waste of paper or because we think we’ll find a future use for it. which strikes me as rather ironic that as a newborn we come into this world with empty clenched fists, but somehow end up with the span of a lifetime’s worth of belongings, that even as we take our last breath are unable to bring along with us to the world beyond, where ever that may be.

so i figured it’s time to start clearing some stuff that i never look at and will never need in the hopes of organising my space and in the process, my life 🙂

the amount junked so far:

many years worth of design notes, artwork, drawings, old textbooks and etc accumulated from my time as a student. they would have been priceless if i’d had to put a price tag on them, but to the rag and bone man who clears out junk on a regular basis, only accounted to a measly $4.50 …. i certainly hopes he brings them over to the paper recycling bin though. i’d feel bad about all the trees i killed if not for the sentimental value.

am only half done with one cupboard and have like 3 more drawers and an entire wardrobe to clear, but i took a break because it’s a much more time-consuming task than i initially thought it’d be, and whilst clearing out stuff i took some snapshots to serve as lasting tributes. after all, digital files in cyberspace take up far less space than physical objects in the minute universe of my room 🙂

so here’s in no particular order, bits and snippets of my life and my past. most of them are old artwork, some of which i couldnt bear to junk until now, but in reality i hold no use for them any longer other than to look upon with fondness. but we all must move on someday, don’t we? teehee but those on display here were mostly kept (i think) because i still have so much affection for them, useless or not 🙂 others have been disposed of, but not before a quick snapshot was taken, just for memory’s sakes 🙂

the corkboard sign i did in art class, way back in kindergarten. i was so proud of it because i got an A… ;P junked 🙁

now this is embarrassing, but i actually owned like four parapara paradise VCDs from secondary school days when they were all the rage? lol… damn funny now that i think back. what can be more nerdy and corny than synchronised dance moves danced in an arcade machine? i cringe.

kindergarten class photo 🙂 spot me! ok if you can’t, i’m the first girl in the first row right in the middle of the picture (to the right of the ME words under the picture) back when i was young, i used to have this kinda cute but stupid habit of smiling with my lips pursed/hidden. my kindergarten logic told me that all cartoon smiles looked like 🙂 and i wanted my smile to look like 🙂 as well… haha!

my first ever “artwork” done in photoshop 🙂 i remember this vividly from a secondary two photoshop class because it was that teacher and that class that spurred me onto design as a profession 🙂 though i’m failing rather miserably at it now… it’s not much of an artwork because it was simply copied off a picture, but i was so proud of it back then!

i used to draw these curly wurly flowery designs with black pilot hi-tec ink pens on my back of my hand and my dad would threaten me with cigarette burns “if i really wanted a tattoo so much”.. haha. well never ended up with any permanent ink on my body… yet.

the pet magazine i collected avidly as a kid, i treasured them so much i ever put some of them in plastic folders to protect them. had like maybe ten to twenty issues at least? junked them 🙁 now with the WWW information is so readily available that such paper artifacts are sadly reduced to a waste of resources and space 🙁

sketches from one of my design sketchbooks. we had to do tones of ideas and concept sketches before doing up the actual logo/packaging. it’s been ages since i’ve done any graphic design… the training was grueling though, to say the least.

relics from the ancient neo-print era of childhood. haha! definitely kept all these.. though i look horrible in most of them. but it’s so funny to look through the huge amount of neo-prints i took back then!

more secondary school “artwork” i actually painstakingly copied from my favourite manga pages and sketched in pencil, then inked them with a black pen for the authentic “manga” look! shows you how mad i was about them last time.

from the not-so-distant past, 2009 last year of my picture/write up in the programme booklet of the competition i took part with. above me is the talented syltra, 1st runner-up for the competiion, who auditioned for SI and made it all the way to like the top 12 or something? i hated the write-up because they took my words and minced it into a formal and silly sounding version.

one of my favourite assignments from design school, storyboarding where we had to storyboard a sequence from a film/movie 🙂 i chose my favourite lilo&stitch, in the scene where lilo goes to the shelter and adopts stitch as a “dog” 😀

teehee i remember getting a really good grade for this assignment :>

yearbook pictures from my secondary two year. i’m the one right in the middle of the picture, with the really big forehead. i dont remember why we all looked so happy though 🙂

more doodles from my sketchbook. this was a bunny i eventually did up into a web-based illustration.. probably lost in the cyberspace of my HDD.

my year 1 end of sem proj which was a series of artwork in 2d/3d based on an animal (mine was the flamingo) and i had lotsa fun with a penknife cutting a papercut into the assignment folder.. 😀

pictures from a paid-for photo album taken in korea, fwbruary 2009, every tour group has a photographer assigned to take pictures which the photographer then prints and binds into individual booklets and you can decide to buy the entire book or pay for the pictures you like. we bought the whole book in appreciation of our lovely photographer, but the pictures were really sweet too 🙂

(sneak preview of the upcoming korea picture post, haha im really gonna post up all the pictures soon!!! more for my sake than for the readers since it was so long ago but whatever)

half-drawn monster in my japanese textbook :X it must have been really boring that i resorted to drawing monsters… (i hate drawing monsters actually.)

and just for fun:

incredibly, i can fit into the empty cupboard! the door even shuts completely lol. definitely will result in a neck ache though. YZ can’t fit into it. teehee. the curious dog came over as well and we tried to shut her into the cupboard but she’s probably scared of the small dark space… :X

still not done with the clearing and cleaning so there’s no “after” picture for you to compare this mess with 😛 give me another week and i promise to have my entire (half of the) room all spick and span the way enid blyton school story matrons would have loved it.

—

and the SYC resumes after a 3 week long hiatus 🙂

studious endeavours by the window