1. CELEBRATE: WORLD WATERCOLOR MONTH
July is World Watercolor Month, a global charity event to raise awareness for arts education started by Charlie O'Shields, creator of popular art blog Doodlewash.
Show off your watercolour artworks with the official hashtag #WorldWatercolorMonth and get inspired to paint with 31 painting prompts by Doodlewash. Today's prompt is "Free".
Info: Artists Network website
2. BUY: LOCAL LITERATURE
Local independent publisher Epigram is holding a sale, with 20 per cent off all books on its online store to celebrate the birthday of the company as well as its founder Edmund Wee.
To get the discount, just use the code HBD. The discount is available until Sunday.
Get books for kids like the Sengkang Snoopers series by Peter Tan, better known as playwright Tan Tarn How, and the Secrets Of Singapore series - a non-fiction account of everything Singaporean like the Botanic Gardens and National Gallery Singapore.
There are also timely books like Alex Au's new mini book The Trouble With Foreign Workers and award-winning novels like Jeremy Tiang's State Of Emergency.
Info: Epigram website
3. Covid-19 stay-home recipe: Crispy golden bean curd puffs
Deep-fried stuffed tau pok (dried bean curd puffs) require a good measure of self-control if you do not want to end up eating most of them fresh from the wok, before the dish even makes it to the table.
You can make your own fish paste - go for mackerel as the fish meat has a bouncy texture. Or use squid to blend into a paste. Remember to remove the squid skin so you do not end up with paste that has a purplish hue.
If you choose to make your own paste, do season to taste with salt or light soya sauce.
4. 30 Days Of Art With NAC: Lamentations by Amanda Chong
Perhaps all this was to awaken us to shapes of suffering: the bruise encircling a nurse's mouth as she peels off her mask. Malls sparkling expectantly for no one. The migrants who built them huddled shoulder to shoulder on backs of trucks - all this we allowed to go past us without second glance.
All this, we only began to see when we were made to stand a metre apart: a woman amid laden grocery carts cradling a bag of rice because all you need for porridge is water. A security guard falls asleep on his feet, then dreams of his daughter across the closed border. She wobbles on a stool, lathers her small hands with suds - I love you. Don't be sick. I love you again - her voice wanders
through lonely cities once thronged with people. Death distends, numbers lose their weight. At home, statistics split workers' dorms from the rest of us. Our comfort feels like shame at first, then swells into an unsettling need for change. We must find the cracks where light comes through, then prise them wider. On Sunday, a taxi driver muses to his only passenger: How beautiful the empty roads, now we see more clearly the trees. I finally hear something
