Different Strokes - Diana's companion

I love looking at sculptures. I enjoyed the sculptures in the Louvre as much as I did the paintings. It is such a terrific art to be able to bring something alive from stone. I have so many favorites at the Louvre, the Hermaphrodite quickly comes to mind. I absolutely love it. Whoa! While I love Indian sculptures for their intricacy and craftsmanship, the western ones have a unique appeal too. Like this one of Diana's companion. What a beautiful figure, I loved the dress, her skirt and the folds in it. Among my extremely limited travel experience in India, my favorite spot for sculptures is the Somanathapura temple near Mysore. I was there last year and it was worth all the trouble of traversing through the pathetic roads. The figures just blew me away! Totally worth a visit.

Diana's Companions
Graphite on paper, 9 * 12 inches
Copyright Nithya Swaminathan

This is my entry for the ongoing challenge at Karin's Different Strokes blog. Its been ages since I painted a sculpture. Long long ago, about 12 years back to be precise, I did a sculpture in graphite, of one of the figures in Halebid. Though I lived in Bangalore for so long, I never got to visit Halebid which is quite close. So after 12 long years, this was my first attempt at doing a sculpture. I have a lot of photos of sculptures, from the Louvre and from Rome. I am inspired to go paint some of them. We'll see.

Karin had requested the figure to be painted as a whole, without cropping. I have flipped the reference image horizontally though. I wanted to do this as a monochrome initially, with various shades of brown. But when I started sketching itself it screamed graphite, hence the choice of medium :) All the entries for this challenge can be seen here. Most of them aremind blowing, absolutely mindblowing. Have a look.

A portrait in graphite after ages

This is a portrait of Jeanette for the monthly portrait study. I have posted it for feedback it the group, and some more tweaks are pending I should say. I am not happy as of now and I hope I am able to fix the issues soon. It was fun doing a graphite portrait after a long long time, more than 5 years if I remember right. The last graphite portrait I did was of my husband, when he was still my boyfriend! And looking back at that portrait now, it looks so childish. This time I used the flatter side of the pencils to block areas quicker and also to get a softer look. I am pretty happy with the shading and the edges, but the resemblance is way off. Your feedback is welcome.

Jeanette Jobson
Graphite on paper,
Copyright Nithya Swaminathan

People on the move

We were out the whole day, traveling my various modes of transport - first by bus and then train, and lastly by a tram. The last time we were out traveling, I deeply regretted not having taken my sketchbook along, for it offered some wonderful opportunity to sketch. So carried my book this time around, and I could manage a decent number of sketches.

Left - Woman in a bus seated parallel to us, and watching my daughter.

Right - A young woman in the bus having a chat with a friend next to her.










































Pics above - Left - a woman in the railway platform, waiting for the train. She was probably solving a crossword in the meantime.
Right - a gentleman in the tram poring into his mobile phone.

These are no value studies or anything, they are more like outline sketches. As I have close to zero experience in sketching people on the move, I could not really get to do any shading. I was and am still getting used to this mode of working, it is overwhelming at the moment.

There are some more sketches which I will upload a little later. All your critiques are welcome.

Going wild with Orange

When the dates for the January VSD were put up, it was mentioned that the reference would really stimulate the artists. I was really looking forward to the reference, and I must mention that on first look I wasn't impressed at all. I later realized that a good painting can inspire any artist even if the reference does not! As the various artists started posting their interpretations, I was quite impressed and started with my version in colored pencil. I simply loved the various tones in the orange peel, and the translucence of the fruit.

What are you waiting for?
Colored pencil on paper, 9 * 12 inches
Copyright Nithya Swaminathan

My colored pencil version was taking a lot of time, as I generally work slowly with CPs, building layers meticulously. After a while, I was tired and wanted a break. And guess what I did, decided an ultra-loose version in watercolors, just to unwind myself. Well not watercolors actually, but acrylics painted almost like watercolors. It was a blast. I wanted the painting to ooze color and I think I succeeded reasonably. I don't think it will pass off as a watercolor painting, but it is definitely different from any acrylic painting I have done. While in the colored pencil version, I went in for a lot of complements, in this version I made the colors as intense as possible. The CP version contains a lot of blues and violets, whereas this version does not.

What are you waiting for?
Acrylics on watercolor paper, 9 * 12 inches
Copyright Nithya Swaminathan

Next I felt I could do one using acrylics as I usually do, and opted for a closer crop this time, and a square canvas. Cropped the right side of the photo and focused more on the fruit. I thought in the CP version, the background almost competes with the fruit, so wanted the acrylic version this way. So this is traditional acrylics, painted loosely, with no underlying sketch. I wanted it to be spontaneous and opted not to sketch, so the fruit looks even more closed and not opened out.

What are you waiting for?
Acrylics on canvas paper, 8 * 8 inches
Copyright Nithya Swaminathan

I really like how the colored pencil version turned out, and I like it best in thumbnail. In the larger format, it shows the mess that I have done to the paper, literally pushing it to its limits. So I dont like it much larger. I used watercolor pencils for the background and washed them with a wet brush as well, and the paper reached its limits beyond a point! As far as the work on the peels go, I think the CP one captures the colors correctly than the acrylic paintings. 

After painting the image 3 times in a span of 2 days, it was well etched in my mind and I wanted to have a go from memory. Decided to have a go with a different medium, and I chose graphite. This was the last one I did and really like how it turned out. So the graphite drawing is from memory, trying to create the values without the help of the grayscaled version of the photo. I picked up my graphite pencils after quite a long time and had a lot of fun with them.

What are you waiting for?
Graphite on paper, 6 * 9 inches
Copyright Nithya Swaminathan

I fell in love head over heels with the Orange and had a blast doing each version. My favorite is version #2, because it is totally new for me. It is the most un-acrylic Acrylic painting I have done. I'd love to hear from you, dear reader, as to which version works and which sucks. Or if all of them are terrible, let me know that too.

The great news is that the Virtual Sketch Date has its own Flickr pool. It is stunning to see all the images together, what gorgeous pieces! You can view all of them here in Flickr (signin required), or ofcourse in the Virtual Sketch Date blog on Sunday, 25th January 2009.

Some sketching in Venice

I have been roaming around a lot over the past few weekends, visiting several places in Europe. Not to worry, I would not bore you to death with all those chronicles, coz that ain't the point of this post. The beauty about traveling in Europe is that the places offer a great deal to the artist. Every other building has its unique aesthetic appeal and begs to be sketched! As for me, when I am away from my canvasses and I am dying to get hold of some paint, sketching is the least I can do and I do not want to miss an opportunity at any cost. All I need is a pencil and paper, so what is the big deal you wonder? It ain't really THAT simple if you are a parent and have a toddler tagging along with you everywhere.

The problem in traveling with a kid is that she wants everything that I can lay my hands on. If I want to sketch, she will want a pencil, if I want to drink, she will want my glass. You get the idea, don't you? So there is really no question of "diverting" her attention to something more alluring. The minute I pick up a sketchbook, she will proactively shout "Pencil" on top of her voice. One smart child I have! There ends any hope of me doing a sketch. This has been happening in every other place, and I only ended up clicking reference images, but never really got around to doing any sketching/painting.

I did not want to get put off by this routine, and decided to carry my book anyway to Venice. This place is really close to my heart, I just love everything about it. Every inch of Venice is a painting, it almost instantly "connects" with the artist. It was then to great joy I discovered that there was something more interesting to my daughter than my pencils. And that was a pigeon :-) So I managed to send her away for a while to chase and feed the hundreds of pigeons at St. Marks square, while I would spend about 10 minutes sketching the Basilica di San Marco. The St. Marks square is such a lively place, full of people and shops and of course pigeons.


Basilica di San Marco,
St. Marks square, Venice
pencil on paper

What you see above is the little sketch that I could manage in about 5 minutes. Ah! Such joy to even get to it after a long time. It is not complete, but I decided to post it anyway. I was forced to stop not by my daughter, but a waiter at the restaurant where I was happily seated. Without taking any food whatsoever :-) He wouldn't allow me to even complete it, huh!