Monsoon Over Backwaters

 This is a watercolour painting of an imaginary scene on A3 size 270 gsm Chitrapat watercolour paper (rough) painted in Sept 2021. From a personal point of view this is one of the very few benefits from the pandemic lockouts of 2020-21. I improved my watercolour skills, and more importantly, I got over my reluctance to use a brush (rather than a pen), by doing at least one watercolour painting daily during that period.

Festival Day at the Temple

I carry a very tiny watercolour palette in my work bag and some water brushes. Acouple of days ago, a short while before I was to leave for home, I felt a sudden urge to sketch or paint sonething. I managed to do this with an image on my phone as my refernece. This is a 5" x 4" black ink gel pen sketch with watercolour washes, done in an elephant dung paper sketchbook, which my wife got for me from Sri Lanka.

Exercise # 13

This is another watercolour exercise. I referred to an acrylic painting done by my cousin and deliberately made some minor changes while interpreting it in watercolour. My focus once again was on colour mixing in the palette and on the paper, fine brush control, and an attempt to portray water realistically.

Exercise # 9

During the summer of 2017 I persuaded my friend and colleague artist Saravanan Chandranathan to give me a few lessons in watercolour painting. His tutorials consisted of demos on techniques followed by assignments. This exercise was of a slightly more complicated scene than the ones that he had set me earlier. The main objective here was control of lines with the brush while working on smaller areas.

Naturally formed stone arch

This picture came up as my Windows 10 wallpaper, and cried out to be painted. I had not painted anything like this earlier and found it quite challenging. But I think I finally managed to get a passable result.

Semmozhi Poonga - May 2017

I did not have much time on location since the park opens late and I had a lunch appointment and had to leave this venue early. I took around 15 to 20 minutes to make a pen and ink sketch of this open air theatre at Semmozhi Poonga and then moved on to my second sketch of the morning. I coloured both later at home with coloured ball point pens.

This was my second sketch of the day at Semmozhi Poonga. Once again a very quick one with pen and ink and then I was off for the day, I completed this one later using colour ball point pens.

A Trial Run

A couple of years ago I went into a stationery shop to buy an ink cartridge for my writing pen when my eyes fell on a set of really inexpensive colour ball point pens. I normally sketch only with black ink and use either watercolour or colour pencils for sketching in colour. But I was tempted by the price, bought the set, and was looking for a subject to try them out when I received a Whatsapp message...one of those wise quotes printed over a pretty picture. Here is my version of that image done with pen and coloured ink.