The making of a Tanjore painting

I love any artwork that is detailed, textured and has intricate patterns - be it stone carving or wood work. Some of the Tanjore paintings I have come across have such intricate handiwork, that I was inevitably attracted. While there is no way I can attempt stone carving or wood work, I realized that I could try my hand at Tanjore paintings. After much research around schools, timelines, costs, etc. I decided to join classes held by Chitra Ramesh.

Chitra is an awesome teacher - totally professional and meticulous in her approach to teaching. (You can check out her other paintings here - Chitram School of Tanjore Painting.) She provided all materials needed for the classes, including step-by-step instruction notes which ensured that I was familiar with the overall process even before I began.

I believe the art form is wrongly referred to as a "painting" - most of the art depends on the "mukk-work". The funny sounding "mukk" is actually a mixture of chalk powder and arabic gum. This mukk forms the base for the embossed regions and is also used for the intricate designs which make the Tanjore painting so beautiful. Once the stone-work and mukk-work is done, it is time for pasting the gold foil around the embossed regions and then painting the non-embossed regions. And voila, your Tanjore painting is ready!

Here are a series of WIP pictures, that describe the making of my Tanjore painting...

After the "mukk-work"

A close-up of the intricate mukk designs

Gold foil adding to the granduer

The painting bit

 And finally, after 4 months of weekend privileges sacrificed, this is the beautiful outcome:

Finally, I made a Tanjore painting!

My experiments with pencil shading

So, the other day I was thinking of how this blog is titled "Doodler-Dabbler" and how there haven't been any doodles so far. Too lazy to come up with something new, I decided to put some old wine (old sketches) in a new bottle (the blog) and get away with it..

All of these were done during my college days when I had joined sketching classes. I totally loved the time I spent on these - the only time I have come close to a meditation like peaceful trance is when I am absorbed in art. I am not very creative or skilled, but I do love all art forms so much that I keep trying to learn (much to the exasperation of all my art teachers.) All of these are based on pictures from other sketchbooks and not from life - any resemblance to people/animals living or dead is purely coincidental :P

So here goes..