Sari Art: Lacey Circles

This sari art is a work in progress and an evolving one too. It started with the drawing of a stylized swan. Then I decided to put it in relief with lots of circles around it. In the zentangle vocab these circles are called tipple, which incidentally is this week's challenge at I am the Diva. It is one of my favorite tangles.

The completed sari art will be revealed soon.

Linked to Paint Party Friday. 

Sari Art: Birds of Same Feather

When I first started selling my art a few years ago, I used to do a series of mixed-media artwork which I called "Sari Art". Using watercolors and actual sari pieces I tried to capture the complex colors and textures of Indian saris on paper. It was really fun to do  and interestingly enough there was a market for it.  After a while, I moved on to other things.

For this week's Summer of Colors challenge (Purple, Purple, Yellow), I dug out an unfinished sari art. The main section was already painted in purple color along with the purple border which came from an actual sari.  Last night,  I added a couple of paper birds, colored them yellow and added the phrase "birds of same weather" also in yellow.  I like the effect of purple and yellow together.

You will find examples of other sari art pieces on this blog here.


Linked to Paint Party Friday and Summer of Colors.

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Painting Summer Colors with Limited Palette

This week's colors for SOC are Pink, Pink and Orange. I am not a particular fan of pink but I love its darker and richer shades like magenta. Orange always gets my muse going. Typically with this background, the bird would be in silhouette but I like this one too.

Created for Summer of Colors and Paint Party Friday challenges.

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Doodle by Any Other Name

As a young school girl, I was an incorrigible doodler. I would fill up every available empty space in text books and notebooks with drawings of flowers, leaves and butterflies. It annoyed my mother very much and she would remark "scribbling hand means an empty head". Contemporary mind-body research confirms that she was right but not exactly in the way she meant it. I am not sure what caused me to be such a doodler but the habit has continued. The photo above on right is a page from a notebook from the 80's when as a young homemaker on a tight budget I used to keep detailed account of income and expenses. Perhaps, it was worry or hopefulness about money that caused me to doodle flowers around the numbers. I doodle a lot while in meetings not out of boredom but to hear closely what is being said or not said. I also doodle while thinking through a difficult problem. I have noticed that I don't break out for doodling while making art!

Today, doodling has not just achieved mainstream respectability but has even been elevated into a spiritual movement, albeit with a great commercial potential. It has metamorphosed from childhood deviancy to therapy for senior citizens. Along the way, it has acquired a prefix (Zen) and a couple of suffixes (tangle, art).

Whatever it is, I am happy to be part of it. I wonder what my mother would say to the fact I have even published my doodle art in a prestigious mixed-media magazine (photo above on the left in Zen Doodle Workshop from Cloth Paper Scissors, Summer 2015). I have a feeling she will be proud no matter what her personal opinion about it was.

If you want to see more of my "doodle art", click on the Zentangle Inspired Art tab at the top of the page or click on this link.

Submitted for PPF.

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Fearless in Chittagong, Bangladesh

Bangladesh was the place to explore in the Virtual Paintout challenge two months ago. I missed the challenge at that time but there were so many visually engaging sights there I had to do a painting even if it was past the deadline. This image of a little girl riding on the back of a cycle rickshaw packed with water cans at Airport Road, Chittagong caught my eye. There is barely any standing room but the girl is tiny enough to squeeze in and hang on to one of the ropes holding the cans in place. Only a child with no sense of fear could do it.The road had only light traffic with mostly bicycles and cycle rickshaws. So the girl was quite safe that way. But what was interesting was to see a girl in such bold position when there were so few girls visible in public.

It took me several tries before I got the proportions of the girl right to the stack of cans and the father driving the cycle rickshaw. I made the colors of the salwar-kameez brighter. I am not totally satisfied with the overall picture but will do for the present.

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Submitted for paintpartyfriday

I Am All Boxed Up!

This week's I am the Diva challenge is to use "All Boxed up" tangle by Alice Hedron. This tanagle nicely followed last week's challenge to use only straight lines. So, I continued with last week's project of planter redo and added a bunch of I am all boxed up around the outer edges. I all also added some turquoise blue color in the middle rectangle to brighten it.. I like the way the whole thing is shaping up.

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