I made Durian! :)

Durian season is finally here! I was having durian at home with my family. My dad brought home some durians from Raub, (Yes he drove all the way there just to get durians) Durian is one of my favourite fruits in Malaysia. I cannot imagine a world without Durians, the world would seem so boring, so lifeless & so tasteless (Hey if you follow me on instagram you’ll know I’m drama like that LOL)

Okay back to the story when my dad was cutting up the durians, I had the idea of turning them into miniatures. Durian’s pretty iconic in Malaysia, SIngapore and some other asian countries. So I thought to myself, this would be a good idea for my “Malaysian Food series”. I picked up my phone and started snapping the little details on the shell, and the yellow fruit.

The process of making the first durian was painfully long. It took me about 10 hours to make all the little thorns and I had to shape them individually. If you look closely on a real durian, you’ll notice that every single thorn looks different. I took quite some time to study how the thorns are arranged on the real fruit.

Took me few tries to get the size of the durian thorn right (Not exactly like the real thing, but more of how I wanted it to be). I didn’t want to make them too small (hard to see from far) or too big. I had to take these things into consideration, like how it will look like from a distance, or will it cause discomfort and stuff when I’m creating something to wear. Since they will be made into things that you can wear, like cufflinks or stud earrings, I had to make changes to how I want it to look like, rather than referring to the real thing. Real durians have longer and sharper thorns, but I had to make mine shorter and blunt because I don’t want anyone to stab /hurt their self LOL.

Colours of the durian shell is also quite frustrating for me. At first I went with a brighter green. But as I was starring at it, it looked more like a fruit which has not ripen yet. Perhaps the colour is too light. I realised this too late, as I was just finishing up my photoshoot with the durian, I thought to myself: OH CRAP now I have to change the colour and replace all the pictures again. But heck no, I had no time to do that HAHA. So I went on with the pictures on my instagram, and later uploaded the amended colours on the durian shells.

This is the durians with the new shades. I added some lighter and darker shades on the shell, and  some brown spots to make them look “ripe” as well. I personally like this better, so I decided to make all my durians look like this.

I had a stall in an art market in Publika earlier in August. I thought I should make a little Durian stall for my stall. A stall in a stall, geddit geddit?
Wait, maybe it was my part timer’s idea (Jaey)? I can’t recall haha! Originally I wanted to make a little lorry as my stall (Like how people sell durians by the road side). But I was running out of time, so I figured I should just make things simple LOL. Worked on some simple visuals and printed them out. Stuck them to my little wooden display and tadaaaa, my little durian stand.