My First Mural ...

/hihi

Wish you a very happy Ganesha Chaturthi to you all ... I will be in my native place during the festival, so wishing you well in advance. We celebrate Ganesha Chaturthi in a grand manner compared to other festivals in Sirsi, probably due to the extended influence of Chatrapati Shivaji. As you must be aware of, historical records reveal that Ganesha Chaturthi celebrations were initiated in Maharashtra by Shivaji, to promote culture and nationalism.

In one of my earlier posts, I had uploaded a work-in-progress Ganesha mural. I somehow managed to complete that today and posting it here.

When I started this, I did not give much importance to the traditional aspect of Ganesha. I made Ganesha with Right Sided trunk, after speaking to the family members and reading some articles I came to know that usually we don't keep the idol with right sided trunk at home. Since I used m-seal and it was already dried up, so I could not just change the trunk alone, I had to remove the work completely and start everything from the scratch :( . But the good thing is - it came up better than the earlier one.

I took a 12 X 18 inches mdf board as the base and Shilpkar, white m-seal which is used for craft work (used 1.5 kg of m-seal). As m-seal becomes harder within 10-15 minutes once you mix it, you have to  mix only the required quantity and to be really quick to get the appropriate shape. Moulds for some of the basic shapes like leaf, flower, lamp, bell etc. are available in the market, I thought it's not worth spending  money for those items. As this work is completely hand made, the shapes are not symmetrical :) I have used knife, broken spoon, pen refill and some of the clay modeling tools to get the required design. By the way I have used mustard seeds for the texture surrounding Ganesha.

Some more photographs are uploaded here - https://picasaweb.google.com/aasha.bhat/MyFirstMural

I made a mistake in positioning the eyes, doesn't look like an elephant but  looks like human eyes :) I was kind of desperate to finish this today, and realized the mistake only after I am almost done. Now I don't have time to correct it, will do that sometime next week and upload here again. Finally I need to apply varnish and put a frame once I am back in Bangalore.

PS : I know some of you had issues in viewing the animation video uploaded in my post titled 'Its time to share an animation work'. It works well with IE7.0 and Firefox 3.6.20, please upgrade your browser and try once again.

Best wishes for a peaceful and happy festive season! /bye