Wings at Work

Medium: Mixed Media on Wooden Board
Size: 12"X12"
This is a Monarch butterfly with a yellow flower. This is mixed media work where oil pastels, acrylics and multipurpose colors have been used in combination to achieve the final result.

I used only the clear color on the top of oil pastels to fix as oil pastels tend to smudge and I do not like using those sprays to fix oil pastels sometimes. This color gives a glossy finish and long life to the painting. The Calcutta Street Scene and Florida Sunshine were done using these colors. These colors are not available commercially. My art instructor in Delhi makes these himself.

So wish you all a very happy and prosperous New Year :)...Have lots of fun !

The Cockerel

Medium: Collage
Size: 12" X 16"
So here I am back with my finished version of the rooster collage. I learned a lot of lessons from this painting and one of them was to use a color scheme where the main subject totally stands out from background. Initially I made both the background and the face red...and so I had to play with the values and therefore made the background around the face of the rooster more yellow and lighter for the face of the rooster to stand out. Another lesson that I learned was to work on bigger sizes when the subject is something like rooster.
Then the next challenging thing was to make the grassy foreground stand out from the red walled background...somehow it was not happening and I suddenly got the new idea of making a gray pavement on the side separating the two and I am happy that it worked really well. Sometimes spontaneous ideas really work and even though there is lot of planning that we need to do in the beginning...there should always be room for new and spontaneous ideas...sometimes they may work and sometimes not...but it is important to keep trying.

Florida Sunshine

Medium: Mixed Media on Wooden Ply
Size: 24" X 12"

Just completed this one last night. Here you can see all the three sets of complementary color (green to red, orange to blue, yellow to violet). This was an experiment where the background was done in Collage with handmade and handpainted papers like the golden apples in Golden Triplets. And did the Sunflower with accent liner and glass paint. And at the end accent liner turned out to be a good way to sign the painting as well. Initially I had no idea as to how will I do the background while I was doing the rooster (which I should be completing this week) in Collage. And suddenly a thought came to mind that I could do the collage in background and I had visualized how the painting will look finally. You know sometimes we what we visualize and what finally we end up doing are not same. But here I pleasantly surprised myself by achieving what I aimed to accomplish. So the next one in the making is a rooster. You want to have a sneak peek into it. Here you go :



I should complete the neck and the grass below. Waiting to receive the handmade papers from Judy who makes beautiful chunky handmade papers. And the best thing about her is that she makes the colors and values the way I want them.
So see you all in the next post with my completed Rooster painting and you all could probably help me in naming the painting. Something out of the box....I am just not able to do it.

Preening Egret

Medium: Oil on Canvas
Size : 16" X 12"
I love birds and this is one of my favorite bird portrait. Initially I was wondering if the red and black background will work but after completing I was completely satisfied. As I decided to do this painting in one go I had to do the background in acrylic as it dries faster. To make the composition more interesting i used a little of pink and purple above and behind the beak for shadow.

Golden Triplets

Medium: Collage on Wooden Board
Size : 12" X 12"

I did this collage at a workshop in Amelia Island with Elizabeth St. Hilare Nelson.The three days at the workshop were real fun. The main reason why i like this style of art is because of impressionistic look it has.
In Elizabeth's class the first exercise everyone does is to make an apple. And i am glad that i did one with three of those :). It gave me an opportunity to learn and master the technique.
Here we first color different types of papers...like handmade, maps, book papers, music sheets, newspapers etc..basically any kind of paper which we think we want to use. Then we make a pencil sketch on a wooden board and lay the basic color values and then glue the torn pieces of paper on it keeping the values in mind. And keeping the values right is the real challenge.
Thanks a lot to Elizabeth...my art instructor and a great friend. She made sure that all of us get our basics right. I fell in love with her work when i saw it for the very first time.