A rose by any other name smells as sweet

** "BIAS" is a special feature in my blog where I get to say whatever I want with scant regards for your feelings. I'm not politically correct in this feature, so go ahead, judge me."


During my wedding, I put up a portrait of a rose à la beauty and the beast instead of the usual picture of me and my wife. It had attracted quite a fair bit of attention and even the banquet manager asked me about it. Actually we wanted to bring it up to the stage to talk about it but I thought it's just too troublesome, so here I am to blog about the origins of this mysterious portrait, haha! I can't remember exactly the date but I did remember the year in which it all happened. It was in 2006 when I first decided to do up this project.  We loved beauty and the beast and the ideal behind the whole story and I promised my wife that on the day of our wedding, we would have this picture of beauty and the beast out there for everyone to see.


4 years had passed and I didn't do much about it until the start of this year 2010. I started conceptualizing the idea in 2007 and had a good idea of what to do. I wanted to re-create the glass stain effect but using cut pieces of coloured paper and pasted onto a black cardboard.  The end result should look somewhat like the picture below. However, I can foresee the difficulties involved and decided to do a scale down version of this, so I just took out the key and central idea of the picture, which is the rose, beauty and the beast.

The original idea is like that, but I realised it's too difficult to pull it off

I bought the piece of black cardboard in 2007 (I kept the receipt!) and bought the materials needed, but it wasn't till earlier this year before I actually started doing it. All the while I was procrastinating because I'm not confident that I can pull it off. That was before I even had the idea of marriage so I think it's understandable. But as I'm more sure of our eventual marriage, I can't delay it further. I sketched out the general outline of how the whole project should look like:

Sketched out onto the cardboard. Decided to just focus on the central idea of the picture.

I decided to do up the rose part first. It's quite screwed up, on hindsight because I was experimenting with how to actually cut pieces of paper and paste onto the outline sketched onto the cardboard. I finally decided on using tracing paper to trace out the outline again, then transferring the lines onto the coloured pieces of paper, cut it out and paste it. In a way, I'm creating my own carbonated paper by using tracing paper. Here's a few pics of the rose part. I loved the brilliant colours!

Thereafter I went to reservist... it took me quite a few more months to get my ass back to work on the project again. I think having done the rose part is itself a motivation for me to continue. I've no idea on how the overall project would look like because I'm doing section by section and deciding what colours to use based on the overall feel of the colours combination. As I continued to the beauty and beast section, I screwed up again. This part of the project requires a different skill set from what I did for the rose part. The cut pieces of paper are so tiny that it's very difficult to cut properly (I can't even hold it using 2 fingers). I don't even want to think about how to paste it since I can't hold it properly. In the end, I've to make do with a toothpick to position the cut coloured pieces of paper onto their proper places on the cardboard.

Having done the hardest part of the project, the rest is smooth sailing. I agonized over the choice of colours to be used for the backdrop on the rose section to give overall compatibility in colours, and eventually I settled on this particular olive green colour. Quite pleased with myself :)

The final look of the project looks like this:

My mum helped me to select the colours for the frames and the margin around the picture. This is what is seen on the wedding night itself, displayed on an easel.

How's that for a 4 years project? haha :)