Painting the lady with a parasol

Summer time in Kanpur can be pretty devastating unless you are prepared with stuff to occupy your mind so that your body doesn't feel the scorching heat in its entirety. I am sure this wasn't the thought process then but perhaps just a lot more time available time on hands that led my younger self to sketching and painting during the summer vacations. My subject would most often be the back cover of older copies of reader's digest that I had taken from my grandmother, a regular subscriber. They often used to have reprints of famous works of art during those times. It also happened to be a time when I was greatly inspired to try oil-pastels thanks to my father's  very good friend who once made a beautiful birth-day card for me, a bunch of flowers in a vase done in oil-pastels. It was a wonderful painting, rich in colour as well as texture, it captured the essence of the flowers so well but most importantly it was made specially for me!

The choice of subjects in my case, being reprints of famous paintings, of course often had a great disconnect with the local setting. Like this oil-pastel painting I made was of a lady with a parasol!

I was curious if after all these years I could trace the original painting. Thanks to Google and my honed-over-the-years googling skills, sifting through several images of various ladies with various parasols, was I guess quite a favourite subject with painters at one point, I could find the original…..

Long time

This painting actually started last winter vacation. The sketch was made with much care and I was really excited about painting it. The painting, however, got off to a terrible start as I was completely out of touch with doing the acrylic paints with less medium (water), that makes it look more like an oil painting.  I had done a few messy petals and left it at that. There is nothing more dissatisfying than a good sketch spoiled by bad painting.

I had kind of forgotten about it till my good friend asked me last week why haven't I painted for the longest of times. That little nudge got me watching a few youtube videos and the one I really enjoyed was this one. It is really nice because she teaches not only how to paint but also how to fix your mistakes as you go along. I was decided up on doing the pear, as in the video, when I found my half-messed sketch in my crafts kit. I must say, that is one thing really nice about doing the oil painting style with acrylics, they are way more forgiving than water colours. They allow you to cover your tracks when the need arises. I had a brilliant time doing this and am hugely satisfied with the end product ......

Taking the monkey.....

This has to be the best story on restoration of art.

Big-cat

Inspired by my cousin's artwork and her teacher's web-portfolio .