There was one thing I did during the Shanghai stint that my sis lost all respect for me over. It was an activity vaguely like painting, except it was done through numbers. She could not believe I can lower myself to such a level. 😀 But what difference is that from her taking over my works and painting over them?
Here we go: quite pretty, right?
This is a very stress-relieving process! How it works? Each canvas comes with little outlines filled with numbers. Each package comes with a brush and a series of mini-tubs of paint with a numbered sticker on top. If you can keep within the lines, you can read numbers, and you can follow instructions, you can complete the paintings above, easily. There is no need to match colours, no mathematics required either, and no planning of which tones / areas to start and which to end. No layout, no sketches, no composition, just match number on the tub to the number on the canvas. Tada~
It was a form of meditation for me – pure focus on identifying numbers. Ooooh, I like a 5 today, so: open mini-tub 5, identify all the 5s on the canvas and just focus on filling them up. It is really cool. Even easier than zen-tangles and more zen-ifying.
I recall producing many more than just these three above. We started some DIY painting workshop on the island, and this was one of the art activities we held. Other stuffs were things like origami, jewelry-making, cross-stitch, polymer clay, I can’t remember what else. It was a fun time producing samples (and realising I’m actually so multi-talented!)! But I cheat. The painting samples above were painted with a palette knife rather than the brush that came in the pack, haha. Thus, they look livelier than could be achieved with that tiny poor quality brush. 😀 😀 😀 Cheap thrills in life.
I don’t know where they are now. Probably burned on the stake or shredded and dumped into the river Mao, or sneakily kept as collector’s items. Well, we’d never know. 😀
Haha, droll story.
Just now I am not more worried about painting with template! I think too: that´s a good meditation. I make it sometimes in Paint with detailed mandalas. Compose the colors and klick-klick-klick like a child. 😀
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haha! Klick-klick-klick as in computer mouse-click-click-click? 😮
I like colouring books! It is time I take over my nephew’s to colour. 😀
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Yes, Paint is a simple coloring programm. There I had loading up some simple graphics and mandalas and so I only need to click on the brush or the paint bucket! 😀
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😀 😮 😮 😀 I’m tired of mouse-clicking for work! So that will not help me with de-stressing
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Haha, I understand. I am a teacher for IT in primary school and children love that mouse-clicking. It´s very hard for them to hit this small icons and so I thought it could be a very good training to click on the paintings. That´s why I had to tried that myself. For me it´s a de-stressing from work with all my lovely chattering children. 😀
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Beautiful and I use art meditation/journal meditation as well as regular meditation based on my needs at the moment. Each one is a great way to connect with yourself and the universe!
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That’s great!
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Paint-by-numbers sets were bery popular when I was a boy (in England), I would often get one for a birthday or christmas present. I haven’t seen any since but I now see a lot of colouring in books for grown ups. Yes, it’s all for reducing stress.
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Wow, I have only seen colouring books, but not paint-by-numbers. I still fiddle with my nephew’s colouring books and sticker books now and then. It’s fun.
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My grandmother used to do paint by numbers….we all loved them and my aunt has about five framed in her house. They’ll never be in a museum but there is something to be said about anything done by hand.
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Wow, I have absolutely no idea that this has been around for so long!
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