Some sketches over the weekend

We had gone to this little lake close to where I live, and I managed to do a couple of sketches. My daughter was so excited seeing the ducks over there and wanted to feed them some bread. This is dad and daughter enjoying themselves feeding the birds. My husband is actually a lot thinner, and I couldn't get the proportions exact as they were moving constantly and it wasn't very easy to sketch. The little one looks quite closer to real life.

Feeding the ducks
Copyright Nithya Swaminathan




And then closer to us were a few more gentlemen who had come fishing. There was this elderly gentleman who has set up all his angling equipment and was sitting patiently with a drink in hand. I loved his pose and the entire setting. There were 3 guys in all and I would probably paint them later. Just managed to sketch this one.

Waiting for fish
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.

Primary colors

Yet another attempt at working from life, also with a limited palette. I wanted to try my hand at doing fabric, that too from life. Cannot say I am entirely satisfied with the fabric, I am sure there is a long way to go. Fabric is one of those things that I cannot seem to figure out for the life of me! It is something I really want to master. More so after my visit to the Rijksmuseum and seeing all those pieces by the Dutch Masters with jawdropping fabric.

Primary Colors
Colored pencil on paper, 4 * 5 inches.

I have used only the primary colors, and the complement of each of them. That makes it crimson red, cobalt blue, lemon yellow and Orange, Violet and Viridian green. The finish looks kinda crappy coz my daughter stepped in to the scene when it was going all fine and decided she wanted to eat that apple! Yeah, only THAT apple. So she picked it up and needless to say the other objects also got distrubed. Thankfully the apple was the one I completed first so it was ok. I took a photo of the composition and completed the fabric with the help of the reference. The patterns in the fabric were not exactly the same in the reference but I had to do with it! I hope for better cooperation from my daughter going forward ;-)

Sketching from life

I generally work from photographs, using them as references and most of the time sticking to the photos faithfully. Once in a while I change some stuff in photos, go in for some crops etc. Rarely do I have the urge to work from life. My only sketch from life experience is that of doing a lot of portraits, where my friends pose for me for couple of hours, and I have no issues in getting the resemblance right, I have done a pretty good job of it so far. 

Pomegranate and Peppers                                       colored pencil on paper, 4 * 5 inches.                 (c) Nithya Swaminathan

Other than portraits, I have never attempted sketching from life n a big way. The sketchcrawl was the first time I actually worked from life doing people and places while on the move and I loved it. It was very liberating I should say. I have always wanted to try setting up my own still life and trying to work from it. I was hesitant to give it a shot coz of my lack of knowledge of composition. 

Recently, I have been reading a lot of art blogs, articles, forums etc and want to sincerely avoid working from photographs, especially those taken by others. I want to call my work 100% my own from conception to execution. The first step in that direction was to pick up a good book on composition (review coming up soon), and then start working from life. This is formally my first composition from life, and I am happy for taking that step. 

I don’t have a specified studio space for myself, so I don’t have a space to create an elaborate set up with a light source etc. It sucks that the lighting always seems uniform in my house. It then flashed me that there was a reading bulb in my bed, that I could use! And that was it, I set this up on my bed J 

Some quick learnings for myself –

• Setting up a simple, bare bones still life isn’t rocket science. This is not a learning as such, it is a reassurance. I picked up the 3 objects and tried some combinations, with a reflector, without one etc, and finally settled on this one. It took me less than 5 minutes! I realized I needed to get used to the paradigm shift of working from life by doing more of these studies, then move on to better and bigger set ups.

Grayscaled Version (c) Nithya Swaminathan

Pomegranate and Peppers

• It tremendously improves my observation – note the red reflection of the pomegranate on the capsicum? I am sure this would not have been captured in a normal point and shoot camera, which is what I use. The reflection isn’t as intense in color as I have depicted, but I could observe that it is there. And it adds a good punch to the painting on the whole.
  
• Working with a limited palette helps to get a better understanding of color theory as such. I have used only one green and one red pencil. Value changes have been depicted only with varying pressure and by building up layers using the complements.
  
• I still have a long way to go in mapping color to value! Have a look at the grayscale version of the image, and there are only 2-3 values, not a wide range. In real, the shadow of the pomegranate was the darkest, the shadow of the capsicum in the front was mid tone, and that of the capsicum behind was lighter in value. I thought I had achieved it (if you see the color version they look different), but in the grayscale they all look like a mid tone. I hope this improves with practice. 
  

Next on my agenda is to create a painting, having only my sketch as a reference, without seeing the actual set up. It will then help me evaluate what all I have missed capturing in my sketch. 

The Indian woman in my art

While I was digging out some of my old sketches as part of a cleaning mission, I stumbled upon this old portrait of mine, one that I really liked. It is done with only 2-3 pencils on black sanded paper. She is supposedly wearing a black sari with a red border, so I have left the black paper as it is to form the sari. With very less actual work done, this was completed in about half an hour. It is one of my favorites till date, as it was one of the very first colored pencil sketches I did and turned out decently.

An Indian Woman

Colored pencil on paper, 8 * 10 inches

Also, while I was browsing some of my work, it struck me that I have been enamored by the Indian woman in general. I have done at least half a dozen works centered around her. They are direct representations of her like this one, or in other forms like the Indian goddesses. I have a fascination with their traditional jewelry, attires and accessories specific to each state, dusky skin tones etc. These are things I do not use myself, I hate any kind of jewelry on me, but I love to paint them :-) I have a few compositional ideas in my mind/scrap book/sketch book, all of which have an Indian woman as the central figure. I don't know how many of these would get translated into paintings, I hope most of them do.It just struck me that I could almost do a series on these lines, and I am working on that.

An "unofficial" sketchcrawl - everyone's welcome!

The world wide sketchcrawl typically happens once in 3 months, and the next one might be sometime in September. The sketching enthusiasts in Bangalore are however trying to make this event a little more frequent. We are having an "unofficial" sketchcrawl in Bangalore on the 24th of August 2008. There is an event created in Facebook for the same, and you can confirm your participation here.

The previous crawl happened in July and was covered well by the Deccan Herald. So I guess the concept is getting popular on this side of the planet too. Hoping to see more artists this time around.

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!

Some sketches, finally!

Its been two weeks since we went for the Sketchcrawl and I finally found the time to upload the sketches. We were three of us, with me were Rohit and Anand. We started the day at Lal Bagh, and did some sketches of trees and people etc. It was a wonderful experience, as it was very peaceful, lot of place to sit and sketch without any disturbance.

At the entrance of Lal Bagh

Its been a long time since I have worked with my pencils. I love the medium and would love to do more pencil sketches, but I find myself more biased towards color. When the world around us is so full of colors, I don't have the heart to restrict it to just black and white. That's just me! I was feeling absolutely rusty for quite some time, since it was my first sketch from life experience (in public).

A quick sketch of couple engrossed in themselves amidst the rich greenery, and I was almost intruding into their privacy!

It was also the first time I was sitting in a public place, sketching things around me in spite of people staring. Lal Bagh, some people were occasionally staring at us, noticing that we were doing some sketching, and it was fun.

The touring car at Lal Bagh waiting for visitors to get in. This pencil outline doesnt do justice to the myriad hues of green over there, with everything from the car to the shed to the backdrop in some shade of green.

A family sitting in the shade of a tree and chatting among themselves. A quiet family outing on a Sunday.

A very quick, almost 15 seconds sketch of a lady who went by, whose personality I felt was rather interesting.

After a couple of hours at Lal Bagh, we reached City Market at the most inappropriate time. We were there in the scorching heat at around lunch time. There wasn't a place to even stand, let alone sit and sketch! And people who noticed what we were doing gave us such weird looks. Managed to squeeze in couple of sketches though, amidst all the chaos.

A fruit seller selling stuff on his cycle

We then moved to a cafe for a quick grub and then I called it a day from there, coz I realized sketching was far more tiring than I thought it would be and I had no energy to continue! Also, the rains played spoilsport and we had to return.

A vegetable vendor, seen from behind

Another couple in a bench in Lal Bagh. I was sitting in a bench next to them, and they knew I was staring at them and started getting conscious after a while.

Over a lot of sketching, we were discussing a lot of art, favorite art bloggers, favorite media and all things related to Art and art alone! It was awesome. Also gained some intro into Mathematical Art, as Anand does mathematical art and was talking about it. Within seconds he demonstrated some ambigrams, made ambigrams of Rohit's and my names. It was interesting, and all the more fascinating. I strongly recommend checking out Anand's blog and his website.

Most of the sketches here would be converted to paintings, as I have taken some snaps and some notes on the lighting and color. I hope I am able to regularly participate in the sketchcrawls in future, and hope to interact with many more interesting artists around.

Sketchcrawl in Bangalore

The 18th International Sketchcrawl is happening this Saturday (29th March), and we have a group of us going to be sketching in Bangalore too! A sketchcrawl is a worldwide event where groups of people get together across the globe and sketch from life the whole day. What a way to spend the day. And then, we share all our sketches online. Thanks to an initiative by a Bangalore based artist at WetCanvas, I got to know about this event and I am thrilled to bits.

Like me, if you too are not aware of the sketchcrawl concept, here is a basic intro -
- Introduction to a sketchcrawl
- Suggested Materials

If you are in Bangalore and interested in sketching, leave a comment with you email, or shoot in a mail to me. You could also sign up in this thread in the sketchcrawl forum. Lets have fun!