shells, duriken & ilocanos

Hand-painted with Derwent & Faber Castell plus a little technique, and your ordinary scallop shell turns more festive. They are festive as they are for they produce tiny windchime sound, and it's just irresistible.

This one below is made up of tiny brown turban shells like duriken or something. Anyway, duriken is an ilocano term for a type of edible shell that can be found in rivers. And ilocanos are the most resilient, industrious (well, maybe, next to some Chinese) ethnic group scattered all over the world. In one time of my life when i was moving from one job to another, it had been like a butterfly in a garden, due mainly to my ethnicity. in the Philippines, aside from the perennial kuripot tag on ilocanos. we are more known as hardworking... and about kuripot, that is something I really never took seriously except when I was in second year college in Asia's oldest university when a professor touted that we ilocanos are such. It was wrong. I observed it was only because it is difficult to distinguish a moneyed and a needy ilocano. But even the needy, I also find they really are not that "needy" once they put up their butt. So you see, i am ethnocentric.