IDEA Lee

DJ Baby Bok Choy Bringing You a Magical Holiday with His Ravioli Hands

2011-12-11T16:58:00.000-08:00

Christmas Card to Red Dragon

Ho Ho Ho, Merry Christmas. In the tradition of making holiday cards more memorable, as you very well know, this Lee decided to shake up some traditional card structures into personalized messages from your favorite memories. This card features DJ Baby Bok Choy, super star at club "Whaaaa??" for as long as he has been alive; 2 years. This baby has got little ravioli hands that he uses to turn his records on! Watch out, this baby will mess you up. Look how cute and chubby he is with his tinted aviators!!!???

When Stormtroopers Go On Beer Runs

2011-12-10T15:54:00.000-08:00

I love stormtroopers and beer, so when the idea came up I went for it. By mixing one of the only lines they have in the films, "These aren't the droids were looking for," With a line I frequently say, i.e. anything with the word beer in it, magic happened.

This is a birthday/Christmas present for my twin, happy birthday and merry christmas twin!!! You now have this awesome picture to show all your star wars friend. hehheheh.

Merry Christmas Asian: From one asian to another, sharing our love of Jim

2011-12-04T06:33:00.000-08:00


Yeah, I went there.

This is for my circus friend Linh, aka asian, aka my good friend. He does a lot with his art - lots of scribbles of landscapes and people and some other *interesting stuff - (hahahha, you can hit me later) and enjoys doing portraits of people occasionally. I decided to return the favor. Linh also shares a liking of Jim with me. Jim is a lot of fun, he really can make a place feel like home. Sometimes when I bring my friend Jim to a party or with me to visit a friend, the night gets a whole lot more interesting or at least opens us up to say more than we would have with out him.

So in dedication to honing a skill with watercolors, I practiced with making a one-of-a-kind christmas card. Now, Linh, you have the best christmas card in the world. I hope you treasure it forever.

I dont know if anyone is going to answer me, but, "Do you like pizza?"

Merry Christmaschanukahakan My Circus Friend

2011-11-27T05:06:00.000-08:00

Koi fish postcard

I live in Hong Kong now and so I sent a lot of postcards everywhere. My family and friends and former wrestling partners all receive some sort of watercolor postcard. Each one I try to make differently, try a new way of painting I never tried before, and if it is really bad I send it to my best friends to show them how much love and care I put into making their cards. For this one it is for my grandmother in Hawaii and so I chose a scene of fish that I saw when I went to Yuen Long Park in New Territories area of Hong Kong. The giant koi fish ponds allow for some really cool pictures of the brightly colored fish. My wall now has a mural made in their image and so I really enjoy the fish form to paint as well.

Enjoy. Meditate on blue and orange.

Autumn Farmland: Really is My Future Backyard

2011-11-24T07:05:00.000-08:00

Waiting for those pumpkin lattes to magically appear on my kitchen table in the morning, but, hot chocolate still rocks my boat in the mean time.

And just waiting for the fall leaves to start falling in Hong Kong.......Might be wishing while drinking the wrong beer so this one might take a while. For now I have some lovely scenery painted for my room. If I cannot find some maple leaves I am just going to let the leaves fall with my paint brush.

Enjoy Enjoy, happy fall time everyone!

Thanksgiving Card: Just Celebrating the Best Eating Holiday In THE World

2011-11-22T04:22:00.000-08:00

This week has been all about relaxing and getting my correspondence records sorted out. At the same time as I was making my watercolor postcards for friends and family, I decided to enter into a Thanksgiving Postcard contest put on by the University that I work at. What do you think of when you think of Turkey Day? I think of mounds of food as my upbringing has told me to expect a whole lotta of white meat and potatoes with sides of some green things but mostly meat and potatoes, my favorite combination of food. Instead of doing a glorifying portrait of a dead fowl-turned-my-dinner, I chose the more Hallmark friendly and traditional scene of leaves, fresh windy air and a heart shaped tree to make it extra kitsch.

I dedicate this card to my good friends and family. Thanks for being there for me. Print this out and add your own turkey decorations to add extra personality.

Crazy Art-Decked Out College Dorm Room: Paper art for artists who want (to be cheap) murals

2011-10-28T21:37:00.000-07:00

Color Meets Me

I have never lived in a place that I couldn't put my own touch in. My room is a homage to National Geographic's expensive cameras and adventurous photographers splashed all across my walls. My living room, hallways, basement, bathroom, kitchen, TV room, you get the picture, are all covered in art work. It is a must for me to not have white walls surrounding my lounging time. Doing your own home interior design makes your place just that much more you, your style, your likes, represented and there for everyone to see.

This room you see above I lived in for a year and decked it out to the nines with pirate ships, cutouts of dudes, my painting class mess-ups, painted turtles and my favorite was the Tazo Tea bag tags that I use everywhere (paper art or recycled art is like a mantra for me). Clearly, based on the picture above some minimalism could of been exercised but, who cares, it was my college dorm room. That coffee table is made out of the box that the futon couch came in. My roommate and I decided because we bought the couch from an unmentionable store.......We could do penance by making craft projects and really just everything out of cardboard. And so I made a full-on coffee table that housed all our booze in the day and became the world's best can-last-only-two-years coffee table.

If you are in a college dorm right now, have nothing on the walls, or in an apartment, a temporary space, go crazy, because you only live once, why not make your time in one space memorable through the way you transform the space you live in. If you need ideas for how to projects in recycling just google search it and you can find so many ideas. Cut out newspaper images, embellish them, do not buy posters, or if you do, cut them up, make your room a colorful and interesting place to let your eye wander around.

Crack Meets Ashley's Room

Want to turn your room into something like this? A cool modern interior design that screams crazy??!

Some of those things on the wall are paintings, but you do not have to know how to paint. You can just use clippings from magazines, cut them out in interesting shapes, use colors to add spice, and voila! You have a drug induced state of mind room. Get creative with paper and see what you can find online for ideas on decorating with paper. Come up with your own creations. You can look at some of my past blogs on how to make stencils and murals with paper to get some of your own ideas.

Turtle Time: Recycled Pizza Box Turned Sea Turtle Add-On to Living Room

2011-10-26T18:46:00.000-07:00

Turtle Turtle Tazo Tea Tags

Being a poor poor college student, buying canvas for something I was not going to get a grade on was not an option at the time. One night, after leaving another dorm, I happened past a Mark's Pizza box, the biggest one they give out. I found it had few grease stains and so decided to keep it for some later reason.

Well, that reason came up, I wanted a turtle and I wanted to paint it but I did not have any canvas or free-paper is more like it, to use. And so I cut out a turtle from the pizza box and painted it with acrylic paint all in one night. Craft projects like these are easy, its just about finding the right timing, I had the box for three weeks before I did anything with it. But now I have a sweet turtle-on-pizza-box that is paper art to the max. Nobody knows it was painted on a pizza box unless you look at the back, otherwise it looks like a professional painting of a turtle that someone won or stole from a Zoo.

Riding a cool wave - Thanks Pizza Box for being there for me - Hello Sweet Turtle

DIS-organized design: how to easy design your room

2011-10-25T17:55:00.000-07:00

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REgular old recycling: except this time its on your wall

My walls can quickly turn into an assortment of newspaper cuttings that are turned into wall collages. Anything goes really. Colors, black and white. The adds for clothes and jewlery have the biggest color schemes so that is usually where I get my materials from. Life sections have intereseting graphics, magazines have the glossy paper, art magazines have pictures of art, and national geographic has the best landscape/animal/people/star scenes. You get the picture?

If you have blank walls but you read magazines, newspapers, or anything with pictures....start cutting them out for easy decoration. I always like to take out articles too if they were a must with the picture.

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I could of hung a poster here..but I don't have one

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Free art material

For all you college dorm peeps, start reading or just scoping out for pictures to tack on your wall. Most everyone puts pictures of their family and friends but others like to keep it design savy (like me) and keep the walls for the biggest art works. Usually I incorporate pictures of family and friends into the wall collages. Like frames that are sweet because they are recycled and can change any day, unlike regular frames that stay the same shape....boring. So break out the magazines, newspapers or found pictures and start filling the white
walls with color/design/images.

Go. Design.

FIND random - but handy- things like tea strips go green in your recycled art craftiness

2011-10-25T08:04:00.000-07:00

Tea is good. So is art.

I love tea. People love tea. It is one of the most popular drinks in the world. For me it is the variety of flavors you can pack into a liquid substance that just screams delicious. There are teas that taste like fruit, like dirt (ginseng), like flowers and everything else inbetween. One of my favorite brands of teas is Tazo. A Portland based company that has a great simple design that has trademarked itself everywhere. I love it and use its strips both to think about where I come from and to enjoy the colorful effect it has as am eco friendly recycling design method for my home decorating.

The amount of this particular brand of tea that I have consumed can be seen in my past mural and room decorating illustrations. I really enjoy making green friendly and recycled art projects in my free time. To me it is about being resourceful and using things to their fullest extent, from taking FOUND materials to drinking tea to finish an art mural.

Magazine Elephant with Tazo Tea Decals

How do I use them? Well, one day I realized when you take out the staple you have a perfectly sized decal with an burst of color that can be easily placed on a wall to emphasize other, larger, pieces of art. The tags became my other favorite recycled material to collect and place around rooms I have lived in.

Here is my process:

drink drink drink tea tea tea tea

1) Drink tea. I collected mine over a long period of time. Its like what, 20 bgs per box? Well, I really recommend the Wild Sweet Orange and Passion, so start drinking! If you have a tea everymorning, just remember to take off the tag part before you throw it away. I used to come home and find them in my jacket or pants pockets from saving them all the time.

Remove staples:might need good nails (watch out nail biters)

2) Take out the staples. This is a little time consuming but I always turned it into a good thing and would catch up on a TV show or movie while removing them. It became a meditative thing like how doing the dishes or mowing the lawn is for some people. That makes me sound a little crazy, but who isnt?

3) Add small little balls of sticky/blue tack, or whatever you refer to as that white stuff you can put on the backs of stuff to stick on walls. Use this as the easy way to remove and place the tea strips. This makes design decisions easier to make as you can move them around any way you want.

Work with the color or shape

3) Usually keeping color coordinated makes whatever you decal a little more well balanced. I reccomend stocking up on different colors for different moods. They are the easiest thing to move around so find out where you like them the most. I always use a ton of them to embellish another recycled art project.

Choose a design of your own

Adds pop to a BW design

    4) Place them around, into, on, inside, over on top,  beneath, or into their own interesting places. My favorite is using them to emphasize collages or murals I have already made. It makes them pop out more, adds another recycling element to it and reminds me of home all at the same time.

Enjoy.

Hong Kong Swirl

How to Interior Design: Feng Shui your face......./room

2011-10-25T07:12:00.000-07:00

Interior design done Lee style

Circles give off the best kind of relaxation. For me I find the circular shape a meditative one, even though you will never find me

I used the old hold-a-pencil-piece-of-string trick where you have a pencil on one end of a string and the other end is your center of your circle. Just decide the size of your circles and trace away.

meditating physically, or is it mentally? Well, I meditate while watching TV or people. So that must count for something. But, back to the point. Designing always involves a personal touch of whoever is making the intended atmosphere around the artwork. For me this was a must when I moved into my new apartment. I wanted a circle design along the wall because the layout had this section that stuck out already and so emphasizing this jutting wall with a softer touch was my first objective.

Bedroom Decor

World's oldest perfect circle maker

I used the old hold-a-pencil-piece-of-string trick where you have a pencil on one end of a string and the other end is your center of your circle. Just decide the size of your circles and trace away.

Not a perfect circle but the edges add to its comfy feel

Naturalistic Elements

Choose whatever paper you want, I personally love the blue and orange complementary color scheme the best. I just tried to keep the paper cutting smooth and followed the pencil circle line to a T. Inside each circle I decorated to take the eyes away from my poor cutting skills and lack of symmetry with the width of the circles.

Don't be a perfectionist, rough edges look cool

sky sky sky sky sky sky sky sky water!

Make this design your own by adding little details all over. I did some water/sky elements, fire and balancing elements like these lines and dots going in the circle.

The best thing about this style is that you can use absolutely any material and make it your own by choosing what colors and what to include inside. Make your own modern living room by doing your own interior design jobs around your house. Get inspiration from everywhere, google 'interior design photos' and get some ideas on how to make it look professional yet made for free!

Go ahead and make it!

HIGH times DIY inspired Wall Collages: How to home interior design

2011-10-25T04:27:00.000-07:00

Made-from-newspaper-images-awesomness on my living room wall

A lot of time is spent these days in-house. Laying on your couch, laying on your other couch, laying on your bed, horizontal sitting at the dinner table, you get the picture right? Relaxing is my lifestyle motto and usually that involves a computer for some tunes and a comfortable place to crash. If I want to be relaxed I make a point to change my environment to achieve that.

In my room, in my college dorm room, in my now apartment I found myself spending a lot of time in the living areas and so changed them accordingly. The easiest way to do this was some magazine material (i.e. glossy colored paper) and some glue sticks. I did not major in art, but I consider it one of the ways in which I spend most of time during off hours or in between work.

People can understand a person better through their artwork. Sometimes you meet a person and then you see some of their artwork and you can understand them better, or you could be more confused if it is some really crazy s.....stuff. I just want to be able to show people how easy it is to take some colors/shapes/images/scenes and brighten-up, shape-up a room so that they can be more comfortable in their surroundings.

Take for instance this piece of mural art.

Oh hello weird-lookin person next to my kitchen

Totally just paper images from the South China Morning post that I get for free through my workplace. I took a large image (the model who I think is modeling that jewelery or maybe just how large hands look when placed near your head) and added crazy stuff to it. People could do better than what I did, I am just not that perfectionist about placement so I tend to just throw stuff together. I took the images from the newspaper and made this actively interesting collage that I get to look at while drinking tea in my living room all day long. Try it. It is easy, awesome and free!!! How to interior design is said to be something you have to study....or you could just go at it yourself and find what works for you. Artist murals like the one I made add dynamics, color, mood, and a personal touch to any room. This is great for college dorm rooms or any temporary space or if your just plain cheap. Decorate your place Lee-style.

Enjoy. Aloha.

FOUND objects turned into sweet artwork or Don't throw that away! Upcycle!

2011-10-24T23:55:00.000-07:00

My toilet paper roll mounted window frame

Home interior design inspiration for the pack rat:

Every home is full of junk laying around, stuff that is broken, things that take up space but your mother/husband/sister's fiance's aunt/you think you might need it someday. What to do....where is the stuff going to go??? Don't throw it away, turn it into art by recycling/upcycling the hell out of everything.

It can stay right in your home, granted putting it on the wall or putting it to use to decorate something doesnt take up even more space. Recycle Recycle Recycle. Everyone should rethink the items in their homes and figure out what it could be used as. Re-use old chairs, tables, keep the pieces and turn them into something new.Yes, throwing out things is good for space, and what-not, but, how about instead of buying furniture or design books, just do your own home interior design with your own stuff. Make a craft project out of an old chair, table, microwave, tub, (maybe not the microwave because of electrical crap) etc...you get the picture. Getting ideas for how to projects is easy once you find something and then just google it. I usually Stumble upon whatever idea I want to try next. Many people put up pictures of their found art turned interior design inspiration and masterpiece.

Today's post is about finding broken items and turning them into art installations inside your home. Up close your friends might see that you turned a shopping cart into an awesome chair or that your coffee table is entirely made of cardboard, but does it matter? You got free stuff and these days your friends will commend you for finding a new use for something that could of been thrown into a land fill.

Broken window screen, what to do with it.....

trace the correct size

Used this appetizing sandwich pic

I had this window screen thingy laying around behind my fridge and decided to do something with it one day. Turning old things into art is easy when you only have so much. Because I do not want to pay for any decorations I j
ust make them all and this causes more creativity in the
process.

1) Find object. I found this window frame and decided to do something easy.

This is the back part

Finished backing

2) Cut out rectangle shapes from newspaper, do colors because they will pop the best. And coordinate with whatever furniture you have, blue goes great with orange, do a bunch of colors and have a multi-colored installation, etc...

3) Tape/glue/hot glue the colored paper on to the frame in any fashion you like. I chose a bunch of different colored papers and randomely placed them in intervals on the window screen.

4) Set it up anyway you like it.

Tips: Any kind of framing-like structure can work, the lighter the better. This one is kind of heavy and I cannot make holes in my walls so I just mounted it on top of toilet paper rolls in my hallway.

How to Design a Stencil: College poor-student style

2011-10-24T09:02:00.000-07:00

Flying Fish Mural: Cost = $0

How to Design STENCILS: Make Sweet Rad and Handy stencils out of magazines to create DIY art murals. This is an easy step-by-step way to interior design a living room.

Inspiration

1. Pick out your tracing design. Choose anything from just simple shapes, like bikes, food, buildings, trees, words, wine glasses, men in suits, girls in bikinis, whatever you want. I chose Koi fish because I just went to a park that had huge ponds with Koi fish everywhere and decided to make an art mural.

Trace or draw the main stencil

2. To make it easy for yourself, take a design from a magazine, or print a shape out and use that as your main stencil. I free-handed three different fish from pictures I took from the pond.

Cut out stencil

3. Pick out whatever color paper you want to use. If you use magazine paper you can take it off the wall easier than newspaper if you use stick glue to apply.

Make different styles

4. Make as many as you want. Stack the paper on top for an easy multiple-at-one-time cuttings of each stencil. I just use a variety of paper that looks cool when turned into a stencil. For the fish

I took the time to trace them individually. It is time intensive but the pay off for me is worth it. Now you can easily design your own stencil and make an artist mural project for your home.

Choose cool paper, I did orange and blue magazine paper

Make a lot and you can have a huge wall mural


Finished mural

5. Fin. Pick any way to arrange, think about the space. I chose a circular pattern to emulate an underwater feeling. Do this with any kind of stencil. Amaze yourself at your ability! For those of you who cannot draw anything except stick figures, this can help you impress your friends when you tell them you made it. Choose any design and just cut around the edges without you having to do any actual drawing. Just make multiple copies and voila! Amazingly simple.

Making college dorms less ugly and more SWEET-ASS

2011-10-24T06:04:00.000-07:00

Everyone likes to be in a relaxing environment, be around nature, a nice artsy living space and maybe a few animals walking, swimming, flying around could be a nice add in as well. During my time in college I put my creative side to making sure my living space was full of color and design.

From smelly space to smelly space I gathered together national geographics and cut out all the color pages and went to work. These murals did not take hours, and in fact I just prep all the materials while watching movies so the time could be theoretically mostly lounging time.

I knew it was going to be animal themed and so chose big animals to travel on the walls. Whale, turtle, elephant, jelly fish and smaller things like lizard and shark in the odd spots. Tazo Tea tags are what I use to embellish
the design. And beer bottle caps make up the head-dress of the elephant.

Elephant with beer-bottle cap and Tazo Tea strip embellishments

The shark that only ate pie

Underwater scene; whale, turtle, jellyfish and shark

Murals Made with Paper: Bike Stencils

2011-10-23T07:53:00.000-07:00

Bike themed entry way

Want an easy way to decorate without having to be good at art?
Use this guide for a recycled interior design look to your home at no cost!

Make a stencil of ANYTHING and use cool magazine paper to make it
stand out on your wallspace. This is a good, easy, and creative way for non-creative people to decorate their place. Find an interesting shape, or design you like, print it, cut it out, and make multiples. Use color paper and this effect can look professional and hipster.

1. START with getting an image of what you are going to stencil. I just googled handlebars and road bike to find this image.

Simplified stencil

2. MAKE your own stencil by tracing and cutting out a printed image of your own design or google image. Fortify the stencil by using a hard paper stock or 'laminate' it by covering it with tape and trimming the edges off.

3. DECIDE what color magazine paper to use. I chose orange because

all the rest were blue so as to create a color contrast on the wall.Craft projects like this are best done with a form of entertainment going on in the background. Say a movie, music, movie, or a movie, you get the picture.

Don't worry too much about being exact. From far away it will look awesome.

Just make as many as you want.

4. APPLY on wall. I used a repeated pattern which is the easiest thing to do when using a stencil; multiples and spread them out in an interesting way. The color is the thing that matters most so make sure your paper your using has what your looking for.

Now you have ideas for projects of your own. Forget expensive posters or expensive weird colored wallpaper, just do your own interior home design with art murals that reflect exactly what you want to share with the world, or yourself, or your pet bunny, whoever...everyone can be friends with everyone....im going to go get a beer.

Stick glue. Wall. Presto.

A free installation piece for the price of two hours.

How to Decorate with Recycled Materials Part 1: Murals

2011-10-23T05:20:00.000-07:00

Chinese Garden design with Landscape Made with Magazines and Glue

For the bored, artsy, DIY-ers, recyclers, freegan-decoraters and anyone who enjoys making an unused space into artwork that is completely free!

Why buy posters? Why buy frames for pictures? Make them! Create your own in-home art murals with nothing more than magazines and stick glue. This first installation of DIY decorating will cover how to make homemade murals for your living space.

Pick a theme or design to work with

1. Come up with an idea of what you want as a mural. Think about the size. If you have a large space than consider doing a large landscape, or large animal mural. If it is a small space think about what kinds of things you are interested in or want to walk by everyday and see. For me I picked an outdoor scene on my living room wall to make the space more colorful and open than a plain white wall. Look up an image for what you are going to immulate onto your wall or work from scratch. I like to look at ideas online to think about what kind of a plan to follow.

Magazine paper is best for easy removal

2. Gather together old magazines (National Geographic works the best because of all the full color pages). Cut out the pages with large blocks of one color. Start compiling piles of pages and cut outs that are made up of one color (i.e. Green, Red, Orange, Yellow,etc...).

3. Cut out multiple pieces of paper according to the kind of image you are going to make. This shape I use almost all the time as

it cuts down on perfectionist-like precision and adds a more collage look to the finished piece.

Cut out using this shape for a smooth finished look

4. Start applying to the wall! You can draw out a design to with pencil and have something to guide your placement or you can work from eyeballing it. Using magazine paper makes the take-down of the mural easy if you are in a temporary space such as a college dorm room, a one-year apartment space, or your friend's place who doesn't want your mural of a clown on their wall for eternity.

5. Finished! Whatever image your putting on the wall it is always easier to use large pieces, but small details always add to the finished work. Check out these details to get some ideas for your own mural making.

Up close view of paper

Lovely Trees

Flower Motif

*For easy removal just pull off the pieces and some residue will be left but will come off very very easily with a rag and water with no damage to the paint job.