Half tone

The other morning, I was feeling a bit feverish . Baby S was up all the night and so was I.

Early in the morning I fell asleep for sometime, but when I woke up, I didn't feel fresh. I was dragging myself. Maa could feel that am feeling heavy and feverish. When she came back from market, she presented me a box of oil pastels!

 As I opened the box, I could recollect the familiar smell of childhood, when a box of oil pastel would accompany me on quiet summer afternoons. I haven't picked up oil pastels for a long time and I was not sure what am going to draw. The box had 50 shades of pastel and a scraping tool inside. As I was looking at the box, I saw at the back of it there is a small list of possibilities that could be achieved with the pastels! And somewhere it did mention "scraping".It did capture my attention!

So I tinkered in oil pastel for the next couple of days and am happy that my Maa had urged me to try colors!

The art of scratching or sgraffito is an old technique, but I had never tried it before. I had no expectations of the final outcome when I picked up the scratching tool. Essentially, one keeps on covering a surface with layers of color ( ideally from light shades to darker shades). Once sufficient number of layers are done, it's time to scrape off  ( it could be anything : knife/bamboo skewer or any other pointed object) to expose the texture and shape of an image.

 As I kept on scraping, I felt like sharp rays of light emanating against dark background. I felt like I was liberating an image beneath the layers of darkness.

The box of Camlin Kokuyo Oil Pastels was almost of buttery consistency, the pastel sticks did slide on the paper effortlessly.

Here is my work! The inspiration for these sketches are drawn from various sources on the internet.

Stages of layering

Image inspiration : Art work of Shri Sudhi Ranjan Mukherjee, Shantiniketan.

One can add more variation by doing a mix media project : instead of using a normal art paper, use a pastel board ( clay added to induce more grainyness/friction). For beginners, another tip would be to use stencils, instead of sketching from scratch.

There are loads of inspirational projects available on internet. Read more about this from here:sgraffito