Vacation-III

"Let us try to sketch and paint from a picture, together" said Amma to which RRJ readily agreed as long as it was scheduled after the cricket time. They hunted through various pictures on the net and settled on this rather attractive picture of a butterfly sitting on a yellow flower. The depth of focus in the picture was really low so it was a crystal clear picture of just the butterfly and the flower, the rest in the background was all hazy which made it all the more easier picture to translate to a sketch. Bright mood, bright idea, bright picture.

Amma with her regular art supplies which she carries along for every longish vacation and RRJ with his newly acquired stuff sat together on a table and started off. Every now and then Amma would stop her sketch and peep into RRJ's work and say something like "don't you think this line is a bit sleepy in your sketch but looks like standing in the picture?" or "don't you think that the upper wing should come somewhere up and the lower wing somewhere down?" and a bit later "don't you think the various parts of the butterfly should be connected with each other?" Such was the power of politeness in Amma's critical comments that RRJ actually took them in the right spirit and at the end of the sketching session we had our respective sketches ready, both enormously pleased with our grand success at doing art together and still being friends. The sketching session was concluded on a high note with a high five.

Next day buoyed by the general good feeling the previous art session had generated, both of them looked forward to painting their sketches together as long as it was scheduled after the cricket time. Amma just needed to wash the palette to get rid of the previous colours on it before they could start off. And while washing she narrowed on the right tone for her little lecture emphasizing the importance of patience in painting. When she made it back to the table the paintbrush was already at work on a study in monochrome, she could see the nice little sketch of a butterfly morph into a grey moth with huge antennas that looked more like trunks of a pair of elephants than anything else. The painting was over and done with in exactly under a minute. Suppressing the shriek of horror required great effort but Amma in a very mature way shifted her focus to do her own painting. Now there is this thing about Amma and that is when she starts painting she tends to float away from the world around her, her mind gets totally absorbed in the details of the painting and the last thing on her mind are rules of good parenting. So immersed was she that she didn't even notice the face peering over her shoulder was rapidly darkening to the shades very similar to the said moth until it pronounced "your painting is looking like a butterfly. Mine is not." Amma landed with a thud and could see that as much as she enjoyed while she was afloat, it wasn't what she had it in mind, good start she manages fine but nice ending she still has to find.