Peace comes from within, do not seek it without - Goutama Buddha

/hihi

Belated Diwali wishes, hope you had a blast this Diwali with less crackers :) Here I am sharing my latest acrylic work - Buddha, one of the greatest spiritual teachers from Indian sub continent. I have been thinking for a long time to paint Buddha, but was not getting proper idea.

Even after exhaustive search on the net, I was not convinced, rather confused. One fine morning, I started the basic sketching with a plan to convey - how Prince Siddharta came into contact with many old people, sick people and a dead body, how he attained enlightenment while meditating under the Bodhi Tree and his teachings to solve all our inner problems and attain a truly peaceful mind.

  

I felt it was tough to convey all these things in a single painting. To make things simpler, I have decided to have some texture with red color to indicate the sufferings he had witnessed, bodhi leaves as a symbolic representation of Bodhi tree, pigeon as a symbol of peace and a circle to symbolically represent enlightenment. Once I have the sketching ready, I tried various color options for the background using Photoshop.

I was so impressed with texture white which I used in my earlier mural, thought of using the same for the basic texture here as well. Spent quite a lot of time searching the techniques to use acrylic color on texture white. At last I was very clear about the concept, colors to use, etc. Took a 2 ft X 2 ft canvas, applied the texture white and used thin plastic paper to get the basic texture. Once its partially dried, I traced the sketching over the texture which I had on a butter paper. I did not sketch directly, as erasing is not possible on texture white.

Next step was to re-apply the texture white to give the embossed look. I have used one of  the clay modeling tools to give texture to hair and Peepal leaf for leaves. Then I started the 'real painting' with acrylic color, with initial hiccups as I was kind of new to that, I could complete it as I had planned. But don't ask the time I took to complete this work !!! Acrylic color provides you an advantage to work for longer sessions when you are in a good mood, as it dries quickly. 

I have captured the progress of this work and is available here - https://picasaweb.google.com/aasha.bhat/Buddha

And here is the completed work ...

My next plan - The Taj Mahal, an abstract work. Since I had visited Taj last week, I have fresh memories of that wonderful white marble mausoleum. However there is no ETA for this work... :)

Have a gr8 day. /bye

Experiment with watercolor painting ...

/hihi How are you ? Hope things are fine with you. I will come straight to the point, because I am not good at building sentences, developing paragraphs, and composing essays :P I would like to share couple of watercolor paintings in this post.

As watercolor is a transparent medium, you must decide from the very beginning where the areas of white will be in your painting. The best practice for successful watercolor painting is to avoid the areas to be left white and apply the lightest washes first, gradually working towards darker washes. Also you have to be really quick as mixing becomes difficult once the color starts to dry. Of course hand made paper makes life more difficult. I found watercolor tougher than oil paint, might be because I don't get second chance to correct my mistakes :)

I would like to share a Rajasthani Miniature Painting as well, which I bought in a recent exhibition at Chitra Kala Parishat. Vegetable colors and gold powder are used here as medium and its just 3 cm * 3 cm in size and painted on an ordinary paper. Zoom in to see more details..

In such a small area, you can see each and every part of the elephant in detail .. wrinkles around the eye, ornaments, cloth, etc. Also I came to know that the artist doesn't have any formal art training behind him, hats off to his work !! I purchased a brush from him, claimed he used similar brush for this work. Although I knew he had used some other (good) brush for the work, but I was so impressed that I purchased without bargaining. I am very happy and proud to own this work and the brush. The only thing is - I have to make use of it :)

Right now, I am working on an acrylic painting - Buddha. The groundwork which I did for this work is far more compared to my previous works. May be because of that I have developed a sentimental attachment on this work, hope it will come out nice. Fingers crossed :)

Have a gr8 day. /bye

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

Happy Krishna Janmashtami !!!

/hihi

Happy Krishna Janmashtami. May Lord Krishna give all the happiness in your life. No better day than today to upload one of my old paintings - Radha Krishna.

I have done this using poster color around four years back. My intention was to try out poster color as well, so that I can claim, I have hands-on experience :) 

Poster color is a good option for school art projects because it is affordable, and is simple to clean up since it is water based. Also poster color dries within an hour, so you have to apply it quickly. 

Poster color is typically used to make big banners or sign boards. You have to use a palette for mixing the required color as it’s not easy to mix the color on heavy duty paper (which I've used for this work). 

As I already tried oil and water color before this, I did not like this medium ... may be because of its dullness. I could not move the brush freely and I was not able to get nice strokes. Of course, lack of efforts from my side as well !!!

Have a nice day! /bye

Its time to share an animation work :)

/hihi Hope you're enjoying the rain in Bangalore, excluding the troubles like traffic jam, blocked drainage, roads beaming like swimming pool... ohh .. let me stop here.

Somehow I feel, B'lore rain makes me desperate to reach home, where as in my native place it attracts me to come out of the house and enjoy. I am really missing the monsoon of Western Ghats, eating home-made snacks with the family members sitting around the Fireplace (setup specially for the rainy season in the  Malnad region), parents shouting at me to stop taking my bicycle out in the rain .. which I love the most, etc.

Let me stop the flashback as I don't want to be upset and spoil my whole day. Having mentioned as an aspiring character animator in my profile, so far I did not upload not even a single work.  Its time to introduce one of my animation assignments to you all, which I completed recently. I spent around 10 days for this work, implementing the corrections one after the another as suggested by my mentor, finally it has reached this stage. There were jerks in my previous work, so I put lot of effort to make it smooth, which resulted in toooooo much elasticity. I still feel bad whenever I open that earlier version. 

Coming soon .... ;)

I am working on a mural - Lord Ganesha and here is the first look.  I took a liltle bigger board,  have lot of things to do. Once I am done with basic shape, need to apply the color and varnish. I hope to complete this before Ganesha Chaturthi so that I can post that in a blog.

Before concluding, I must thank Mr. Prakash Hegde, who posted my blog in the Facebook without my knowledge :) That helped me to get encouraging comments and got to know talented individuals. There was a bit of hesitation in me to share this with 'Facebook Friends' as I don't post regularly and of course, I don't have too many work to upload here frequently  :p

Keep smiling, have a nice day! /bye

Creative Ideas - borrowed, copied and of course improvised !!!

/hihi I know its quite long I have not updated anything. I am just back from my native place and so much has happened in past few weeks.

During this cricket madness of IPL, I was fortunate to get the remote control and by chance I noticed a show on TV, where they were telling the procedure to create wall hangings from bread pieces.

I thought of giving it a try immediately after reaching Bangalore, although my husband was against me doing these kind of activities. He argues that I'll lose focus from my animation work as I have too many assignments to complete. But what to do, I can't give-up my interests so easily. I want to learn pottery designing as well as murals, not possible in near future due to time constraints !!

I just tried it in a hurry, you can consider it as a trial run although it gave some confidence to me.

Of course, you can prepare many other nice wall hangings, beautiful gift articles with ready-to-throw Iyengar breads :)

Here is the procedure for the interested people.

Materials Used :
1. A pack of bread
2. Acrylic colors
3. White Glue
4. Hand made paper

Procedure :

1. Remove the crusts from the bread slices. If the bread is fresh and soft, dry them under sunshine for half an hour to remove moisture. 

2. Use a food processor to form fine crumbs.
3. Prepare a dough (similar to roti dough) by adding white glue, acrylic color to the bread crumbs. Knead the mixture until it forms a pliable clay.  If you want more than one color you need to make separate batches of dough.
4. Now flatten the dough using rolling pin and make flowers, leaves and other ingredients for your work. 
5. Use varieties of bottle caps (for petals), knife (for leaves) and your fingers to give proper shapes required for the work.
6. Attach the flowers, leaves, petals etc to the base using white glue.

You can apply wood varnish after they are completely dry to protect the bread flowers and makes them last longer. I did not think of writing a blog for this work, so I don't have the step-by-step photos.

Aaahh, its kind of buy one get one free :) Along with the bread flower, I'll be sharing with you on how to make Golden Tree. Don't worry, its Golden Tree without using Gold and is not that costly too!!
I did this few months back, neighboring aunty was kind enough to teach me this. It is easy to make and looks really nice.

Materials Used :
1. Golden Wires
2. Golden Leaves and flowers
3. Beads  

Procedure: 

1. Fold the golden wires of equal length (around 30-40) into half and twist it in the bottom so that you will get branches and stem. 

2. Now take 5-6 branches equally from all sides and twist the remaining leaving a small gap 
3. Spread the branches equally and in each branch twist beads, leaves and flowers alternatively.
4. Repeat the same method for all the remaining branches.
5. Now divide the bottom into 4 equal parts and twist them and make it look like the tree stand. 

Here is my golden tree ....

You can enjoy the pain in thumb and forefinger thanks to twisting the wires for a day or so, along with the satisfaction you get !!

Even though there are mistakes in your work, the good thing is that you can still justify them as intentional. That is called creativity :)

Have a nice day! /bye

Pair of puppies, my neighbors can't hate !!

I never ever thought of finding a subject for the blog is so difficult. In fact, its more difficult than painting and animation!

Let me begin with some background about this work. I've always wanted to have a pet dog at my home, I love them a lot. But I had to drop that idea as I failed to convince my husband, who thinks it’s a public nuisance. He must have plans to stay in the same house where we are currently staying for couple of more years !  Of course I too don't want to disturb neighbors and become the subject of their morning walk. In this whole episode I lost a golden opportunity to become a celebrity in my lane :)

So the only option available to me was to test my painting skills. Since I was just '2 paintings old' at that time, I started searching 'second brain' (google) for some references. After spending considerable amount of time, I found Maggie Miller's Pantry Puppies interesting and here is the link.

By the way, I am giving the reference so that you can compare my work with the original :)

I took a 24 X 18 inches canvas this time, probably bigger than the original painting. At that time I thought its easier to give importance to little things if I get a bigger canvas. Of course, by that time I was more comfortable with my strokes.

Before starting this work, I felt the reference I had was a bit dull, so thought of giving more brightness to my work. By the end of first day, I was ready with the sketching and few basic layers. Most of the art schools I know in Bangalore won't allow the students to take the canvas home in between the work. They don't even allow students to finish the sketching at home. This makes students to attend more classes, and for the people who run these schools its a good business tactics to earn more money. One more trick they adopt is - they teach and give tips on an installment basis. They never ever reveal the tips all at once, although they are related. I am not blaming the painting instructors here, as they simply follow their superiors.

I was lucky to have a talented instructor, who taught me so much technical aspect within few classes, in the absence of his boss. Unfortunately he left that institute in between and I had to discontinue as I did not like other instructors. That left me with an incomplete work, which I had to finish at home. Initially I find it difficult to work without a painting stand, but gradually I started feeling comfortable while sitting on the floor. Finally I was able to finish this work in 8-10 days.

Before concluding, lemme tell you the mistake I did in this work. If you observe the tiles on the floor, they are not aligned properly. It was good when I sketched it, but things got messed up somehow during the final stage and I did not give enough importance to the perspective. I will leave it to you to find out the other  differences :)

Have a nice day! /bye