Alohomora!

May the doors open, may there be a lovely kiddie book to illustrate, not, NOT, oh never, an English textbook! I've been harking back to the days when I painted for kiddie books and magazines. So, when there was this swap of characters from Harry Potter, to be interpreted just as the artist pleased, I jumped at the opportunity. At last, some illustration.

I used the books for reference, not the movies. And, I chose four of the staff at Hogwart's for a portrait session. Here they are: Trelawney and Lockhart and Umbridge and Moody. All these teachers have been painted in watercolours.

My scanner's acting weird, so these have been photographed. That's why the tilt.

Gypsies

I've been painting ATCs on a new site, not WetCanvas. The swaps are more manageable here, for you only have to do sets of three/six paintings upon any theme. The tough part is that you get negative trading points if you don't send your art within the stated time. Oh I love the pressure... or do I hate it? Difficult to describe the feeling.

Anyway, one of the themes was It's a Hard-Knock Life: Gypsies and Vagabonds. Here are my Banjaran. The moustachiod gent is from a photo by MeanestIndian on Flickr CC.

All these cards are in watercolour, on watercolour paper from Auroville. I've made a special attempt to paint them in muted tones, especially after getting drunk on colour with the Solstice paintings.

Puzzle

Here's something I painted in watercolours yesterday. Am thinking of doing more of these. Now, the question is, if I titled this picture Ah, Tree, what meaning does it convey to you?

Sunstroke!

I've been chuckling at the irony of it all. I spent the day painting ATCs for a swap on a new site that I've joined. The swap's called the Summer Solstice/Midsummer Celebration. I kept my old, heavy curtains fully closed to escape the sun's rays, and used up three buckets of water in the cooler through the day so I wouldn't die in his arms, and painted these cheerful images of jollity and passion. Please don't miss the phallic Maypole for all the hair.

Must say I enjoyed splashing about with all these ultra-bright colours. I got them for a fortune in a shop in Bangalore. Now, when I have me all these wonderful paints, mithai, as my artist friend dismissively calls them, where are the kiddy books for illustration? Ah, may Sol and Litha bring me some psychedelic creative opportunity!

Splashes of Water and Touches of Paint

Sharing art is something I love to do. So when a friend of mine suggested that we should paint together, I was excited. Our session was quite brief, though; we painted in the forty minutes that we had before she had to leave to catch the train back to Chennai.

This is what we did: my friend, who's new to watercolours, doodled and splashed colours randomly on ATCs and one A4-sized sheet of watercolour paper. Then the two of us searched the mess for anything we could recognise. We teased out the shape from the splotches, and suddenly we had six paintings, and just forty minutes left to catch the train, forget about going to a bookshop first, and then buying kababs to eat for dinner, and taking photos at the station...



Some reds and yellows and reserved white space turned into this flower.


This ATC also started out as a red and yellow experiment. Not sure whether it suggests wild flowers growing upon an embankment...



This one was the last we did. Patches of yellow and blue with a lot of white space to the right led to some bushes, and then some water, and then a tree leaning over the pool, and then us running out of time. We were thinking of some blue waterlilies, perhaps... or lifting out a white heron...



This little bird we consider to be a poor, ruined thing. Ah, you should have seen this ATC when it was mere splotches of burnt umber and indigo lines. We darkened the indigo lines to bring the bird to life. At that point the painting looked beautiful... very Oriental... even minimalist. And then things got out of control, with a dash of quinacridone here, and a touch of terre verte there. If only this had been our last painting, we wouldn't have had the time to fuss over it.




This painting is slightly more than A4 size. A jellyfish created out of the colours on my friend's t-shirt. My friend now claims to have fallen for watercolours hook, line and sinker.


There was one more ATC, but I've decided against loading that here... it showed a couple making love in the sky, and I might have had to change the settings to warn the innocent or something.

A Banana's Journey

Here are bananas being sold, by cheerful people.

From photo on Flickr Creative Commons by Manjeet Bawa

From photo on Flickr Creative Commons by MeanestIndian

From photo on Flickr Creative Commons by MeanestIndian

From photo on Flickr Creative Commons by Stig Nygaard

From photo on Flickr Creative Commons by O.Pirata

And bananas managing to look beautiful, with the help of props, of course.

From photo on Flickr Creative Commons by Indiewench

Wheeeeee!!! Bananas on wheels!

From photo on Flickr Creative Commons by Mckaysavage

From photo on Flickr Creative Commons by gailf548

And, finally, the end of the banana.

From photo on Flickr Creative Commons by wharman

From photo on Flickr Creative Commons by KungPaoCajun

From photo on Flickr Creative Commons by sa-ku-ra

A Phallic Symbol :)

These are pictures from the last project I was on, in WetCanvas. We had to paint 24 kinds of whatever we chose to paint. There was an artist who painted flowers, another who painted bottles, a third who painted cats, another who painted songbirds... I decided to paint... b a n a n a s. A nice and cheerful fruit, the banana. Associated with babies and picnics and pushcarts and athletes and monkeys and madness and hilarious slip-ups. Easy to paint, too. Also, a banana could lead to just about anything. You could paint banana flowers or leaves, bananas on display or on the tree. Possibilities, endless possibilities. Just what I needed to get back to painting after nearly a month of doing nothing. A phallic symbol, a jumpstart to creativity, laughter-causing not awe-inspiring, which is otherwise the case with these symbols.

AAWWRRRGGGHH! I'm finding it horribly difficult to arrange the images the way I want to. Wonder why. I need to credit the photographers whose images in Flickr Creative Commons I painted from.