Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Art of life

I don't think I ever understood or questioned why almost everyone in the girl's hostel had a row of wall paper sheets stuck together as an essential part of the room decor. It was almost as if ones degree depended on it. So in my room too there was the mandatory wall paper to declare that I belong as much as anyone else and then to personalise there were some pictures of family stuck on them along with the ball-point portraits of SRT and KD (yes I am that old!). Oh those portraits! Looking at the details of the waviness of the hair you could tell that someone had spent hours on it and enjoyed every moment of it.

The images were selected from 'Sportstar', grid lines were made on the image so that the image became a collection of interconnected squares. A corresponding grid was made on a blank sheet, the squares scaled to be bigger so that the sketch comes out to be a lot bigger than the actual image. Then the actual sketching process began, slowly and carefully the details of each square of the image were transcribed to the corresponding square of the blank sheet. With time the eyes took shape, then the nose and slowly the people came alive in the portraits. It was amazing that in spite of limited skills it was possible to get an image right if one just enjoyed and focused on doing one square at a time properly.

Perhaps life is a bit like trying to create a picture on a sheet of time. You work at the details of a square at a time and hope that slowly an image will come alive that will strongly correlate with the notion of the life you always wished to have. Aha, but there lies the catch...... where is the 'Sportstar' to choose the starting image from.... and what if that this ideal image changes rapidly with time?

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