Third workshop and finally.....Colour!!!!

An entire week has sped by and I realised I'm only halfway through my workshops. For those of you following my blog closely sorry for the delay! And for those just stepping in here are my previous posts on the symposium:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

The first day's workshops had been entirely pen and ink work. The next morning I was doing this workshop with Nina Johansson. Given that ink outlines with a watercolour wash is my favourite medium, I was really looking forward to this workshop. Nina's work is terrific.

The workshop was talking about two things - the first was how light gets eaten up as it comes down into the city, into the urban scene that you are trying to capture. We all know and feel it instinctively but the best way to capture this is by doing tonal studies. So our first exercise was a pencil sketch focussing on which surfaces get light, how the shadows are cast and how gradations happen. Part of it was trying to understand more consciously why one wall is darker at the top and another is darker at the bottom and so on. A good tip at this point was to squint and look at the subject so you see tones and shapes rather than colours and outlines.

The second focus of the workshop was how to paint with bright colours, how to mix darker shades and get gradations within a colour without making it muddy. This part was all about colour mixing. Using the complementary to get a darker shade and not adding black (or white) to change tone. The second exercise was to choose a very simple small subject so that we could focus on pigment mixing, and we were all asked to focus on one building The Selegie Arts Centre. It's a peculiar building with a striking form and the colour of the ground floor walls is different to that of the upper floors. So while trying to capture that I didnt quite get any sort of gradation at all!

And finally we got to do our own watercolour sketch in the last half hour. Subject of our choice but keep in mind the tones and gradations and the nature of light from the first exercise but remember our colour mixing too.

Choosing my own subject freed me up and I guess I fell back to my usual style but I did try to keep a few points in mind. These 3.5 hour workshops have all been super intense. You are assimilating on the go. I'm hoping a lot of great things I learnt will start showing slowly in my sketches to come but all in all I really liked the structure of this workshop and the two previous exercises came together to make perfect sense in the third.

Registration and new friends

Almost there. The registration for all participants began at 2.30 pm on July 22nd and i was a little early so I walked around the block and did a sketch on Queen street to while away the time.

It's a narrow one-way street and the pavement is much wider than the carrieageway, something you never see here in Madras! There were these funky colourful concrete benches that looked like they were sprouting from the ground and I started out wanting to sketch them. As soon as I started I noticed a bright orange coloured building dominating the skyline above. That turned out to be the Oxford Hotel where many of the sketchers I was about to meet were staying.

Once inside the National Design centre, the queue for registration was very long. I started chatting with Julia from Costa Rica who was just behind me and Bindi from Kampala who was just in front. As we registered we were given name tags and goodie bags full of sponsored stuff. A new watercolour moleskine with the USk Singapore Symposium logo emblazoned on the cover was immediately opened and my trusty old moleskine was stowed away.

 By 4.30 pm we were all ready for the opening sketchwalk. Hundreds of us walked together to Purvis street to sketch the well-preserved shop-house facades.  The sun blazed onto the eastern side of the street throwing sharp shadows and all of us lined up inside the western arcade on the pavement, the steps, assorted street furniture and cafe chairs. You can see more photos here. We spent close to two hours sketching, chatting, generally being amazed by the fact that so many of us from all over were sitting there shoulder to shoulder.

Back from the sketchwalk I soon teamed up with Bindi again and bumped into Rohit Kulkarni from Bangalore. All three of us were attending our first symposium and decided to go get dinner together.

The workshops would start the next morning. We exchanged notes to see if any of the activities we signed up for overlapped. We also all pulled out our new sketchbooks and ended up sketching our way through dinner!

Setting off for my first Urban Sketchers Symposium!

Monday 20th July. I caught an Indigo flight from the Kamaraj International terminal at 9.40 pm. The day was finally here. I was going for my first Urban Sketchers Symposium.

For the un-initiated I've been a member of this online group of location sketchers since 2011 and every year they meet in the month of July for 4 days of workshops, demos sharing and fun. This was the very first time the symposium was in Asia and of course I was going to be there!

I travelled through the night reaching Singapore early on 21st July. It was my one free day before the official start of the event and first on the agenda was trying to get a local sim card. Singapore has three telecom companies and I ended up in a Singtel store at Bugis Junction in search of my tourist sim.

The place was crowded with people. There were five or six Singtel attendants in crimson shirts talking to customers but a whole lot of other people sitting around on stools. Just as I was wondering how exactly to walk up to an attendant I looked up and realised it was a token system and all those others were waiting (famous Singapore queues!) so I got myself a token number Z1018 and found myself a stool to do this sketch.

The rest of the 21st was busy with personal visits but armed with my local sim I was able to make plans to meet some other international sketchers at Raffles hotel early the next morning for an informal session.

I ended up sketching not the hotel, but a local eating joint opposite which was buzzing with people at that early hour.

By the time I finished my sketch I had no clue where everyone else was so I wandered into Swee Kee to see what everyone was tucking in to. I ended up demolishing a steaming mug of Kopi and some delicious Kaya toast.

The rest of my fantastic experience over the next four days will have to come in installments as I slowly organise and scan all my sketches. So stay tuned for frequent updates!

Sketches make a place look better!

Over the years I've noticed that while sketching on location the eye and the hand conspire in their own way, omitting certain details and more often than not... dirt.  Garbage which is often strewn allover the foreground of many of my subjects don't get into my sketches. Like this one for instance is a group of fishing boats - trawlers - at Kasimedu harbour. The water is slick with oil.

And this one...

Done two weeks ago. Looks like the sleepy Gaulish village of Asterix and Obelix (well, except for the minaret). In truth, this sketch was done on the banks of the Cooum. The stench was not too bad that morning but the river was a dark stagnant grey. Basically sludge. The huts are hovels, patched together with whatever people have. The foreground and the edge where the water meets the land is not really earth but built up rubbish debris!  Its quite crazy how my hand refuses to draw the refuse!

Father's Day

This morning I sat  on the pavement outside the North gate of the Madras High Court and decided to sketch Anderson Church. I've passed by it so many times and never sat down to do a sketch until now. I love the proportion of it's spire.

The really interesting thing is this Church sits bang on Broadway and is crowded in on all sides by hectic business activity jostling for space. Although it was a Sunday morning I wanted to try and bring that in somehow.

Some of the other sketchers in our group were attending a heritage walk inside that I had been to and sketched over a year ago. My father decided to sketch the same church too and we found ourselves side by side on the pavement. Me on the ground and him on a stool.

It was really amazing that for over an hour an endless stream of people, mostly the security guards of the high court, would come up and talk to me and look at the work, ask questions. But no one disturbed my father at all!!

As I finished up my sketch I realised its father's day! I don't as a rule follow valentines and father's and mother's day. Can't wrap my head around assigning days to random things, but found the coincidence surprising. So I wrapped up with a quick sketch of my dad to remember the day better.

His sketch turned out really well too!

Quick trip to Kodaikanal

This week I had to go to Kodaikanal on work. I considered myself lucky. Its not everyday that you get to legitimately leave 42 degrees C and climb into the hills. Kodai was a lovely 19 and my work was done with a couple of hours to go for sunset.

Although for most tourists the highlight of a trip to Kodai would be a boat ride on the lake, I myself prefer walking along the quieter non-touristy parts of the hill-station. This is a view of the boat houses from across the lake. In an attempt to keep the water clean the municipality have fenced off the lake from the pavement. I snuck in through a small opening and sat on a low wall. My feet hung down over some reeds and dense plants. 

Halfway through I was juggling my staedtler 0.7 liner into my bag and trying to get my watercolours out and down went the 0.7! Boo hoo, not only did I lose a pen but I also polluted the poor lake!

Another highlight for me when I visit Kodai in summer is the fruits! We all rave about the mangoes (and they truly are the world's best fruit) but summer in Madras also means plums and peaches from the hills. I took a walk to the fruit stalls to buy some plums and realised there are a whole range of summer fruits up on offer!

Plums, tree tomatoes, egg fruits (so called because the soft sweet flesh is the colour of a golden yolk) grapefruit, passion fruit, star fruit, avocado, pears, fresh badam, chikoo, and of course banana pineapple and apple. I first bought some plums from the shop on the right. He made me taste a half-dozen other fruit and I promised to be back the next day to buy more stuff. Then I walked across to the pavement opposite the shops and started my sketch.

Halfway through my sketch a passer-by alerted the shopkeeper that he was featuring in my drawing. He came and looked at it and was very pleased. Soon the next door shop guy came out to take a look. Then others were summoned. Finally the shop owners wife was called out. Someone shouted "Come and see how she's drawn your husband!"A smiling shy muslim lady came bustling out of the shop, took the book from me and exclaimed in surprise. Then she smiled and ran back inside. Someone else joked that I had passed the test.

The next day I only managed a quick watercolour of John enjoying his morning coffee and book. We were very lucky with the weather. It stayed clear throughout the time that we were out.

Just before leaving I went as promised back to the fruit shop to buy more fruit to take back to Madras. The wife recognised me and gave me a really good deal! Three cheers to sketching!

Not quite Demonte Colony

Last Sunday I joined the CWA group to sketch at Demonte colony. Due to litigation the two residential streets have been abandoned for may years and wears a somewhat haunted, deserted look. We thought we would see plenty of old crumbling buildings and abandoned vehicles, but unfortunately our luck was out.

Recently there was a movie released by the same name, a horror flick, and some scenes were shot here. Droves of tourists have apparently been stopping by and neighbours have complained resulting in the place being sealed off.

We were only allowed into a corporation park next to which stood an abandoned jeep. Further down the pavement was a lady selling idlis in a make-shift food stall. I managed to try out my water soluble graphite pencils a little more in both these sketches. After that I switched to my trusty Pigma graphic-1. A quick capture of a sleeping man on a park bench.

After that the group converged at the park and started doing portrait studies. They got a young boy to pose and several sketchers attempted to capture him. I tried to capture the sketchers.

Young boys playing cricket kept drifting in and out of my frame. They ended up looking ghostly in my sketches.

Francis sketched away rapidly with the sketchbook propped up against his waist. And finally it was time to lay down all our sketchbooks on the paved pathway but not before getting in a last impression of the group huddling together.

Children's Garden School

The Children's Garden School is just a short hop from my house. It was started in 1937 by Mr V.N Sharma and his wife Ellen, with just seven children as students. It was one of the early schools that tried to change regular mainstream education from a classroom format to a play-and-learn kindergarten format.

Over the years, just like everything else it has grown . There are over 3000 students now, its a girls' school with a separate creche, a junior school and a senior school. All available land has been built over to make space for more classrooms and facilities but this old building where the Prinicipal lives is the original building. It reads "1919-20"  at the very top.

In the early fifties my mother too went to this school, to the junior section. I've heard many stories from her  reminiscing about the classes under the trees and in this building.

I sat on the pavement opposite the main gate on Sunday evening and not a soul passed me by as I did this sketch. It was the last sunday before the end of summer vacation. This morning, as I left home for office the entire street was transformed with hundreds of kids, cycles, parents and general mayhem.

Three generations sketching together

My eleven-year old niece Anya is an aspiring artist and always has many colourful and interesting projects to show us each time we visit. For almost a year now, we've been planning and meaning to go out sketching together and it finally happened this Sunday. Along with my parents, this meant we were three generations sketching on location. Pretty cool!

Since the heat is unbearable we chose an indoor air-conditioned spot - House #22 Cafe is a restored old Portuguese style Bungalow near St. Thomas Mount. We started out being the only customers and grabbed a large table in the corner with a great view of the room and the garden outside. We ordered some food but it lay untouched as we all got straight into it. As you can see my mother didn't even bother sitting down!

Before we knew it a couple of hours had flown by. As we wrapped up Anya and I decided to sketch each other quickly. She did a pretty good one of me. Maybe she'll blog it...?

Boats

This sketch is technically only half finished, but given my recent track record I thought it would be better to share it as is, rather than wait to finish it at home, something that may never happen. More and more often, I find I don't have the patience to improve or "finish" a sketch once I leave the spot where I did it.

Last sunday I spent the morning at The Madras Boat Club. The early morning rowing members were long gone and the boats that had been used were lying overturned sunning themselves by the river-side. They looked like giant blue porpoises.

While I did this my mum sketched me! You can check out her sketch here!

Surfs Up

Not many people know this but you can surf at the beach in Madras. Well, not technically Madras, but Kovalam. On proper surf boards with instructors to guide you and tell you about proper technique. Known as the Covelong Point Surfing School, its run by a vibrant new, young group of surfers with a strong connection to the local community at Kovalam.

Right now they just have a shade net propped up on a few poles but a new cafe with toilets and showers and a few rooms is getting built.

Many of my friends have made it a regular sunday outing and I finally went along the last couple of weeks. They surfed, I sketched.

Newcomers are given a tutorial and then made to go through all the motions on the board on land before venturing out. The location has a nice cove (hence the name) where the undertow we have along the rest of the coast is not as strong.

Its just the beginning of April and its blistering hot but there are dozens of surfers from various countries. Some staying at nearby hotels. There are regulars from the city and lots of locals. Young boys from the fishing community are the real pros. Its a real treat to just sit and watch them ride the waves.

Holiday in the Hills

Life and work has been pretty hectic. In the middle of all the madness it was really refreshing to take a much needed break and head out to the hills. We drove to Munnar which is a quiet sleepy town surrounded by vast tea estates. That's the view across the valley from our resort. Somehow the days were packed and hectic too but I managed to sketch early in the morning. I noticed that in some estates the tea bushes are planted along the contours while in others, like this one, the lines run perpendicular. Wonder why?

We only stayed two nights. This sketch was done early on the second morning. The path winding up to our cottage was really picturesque. Halfway up there was a little round viewing deck, although the real stunning view was towering over and behind it.

Win-win

Sunday was supposed to be an interesting sketching event and I was sick at home. Over and above that, I was upset that I hadn't found time to try anything I had learnt the previous week at Dhruba's workshop.
Now my house sits right opposite a Kalyana Mandapam (Community wedding hall) and this is another source of constant irritation. Loud music and drums at 5 am, firecrackers bursting at 11 pm, clean-up trucks and water lorries honking at 2 am and terrible double parking and traffic congestion year-round. You can build anything anywhere in my city if you grease the right palms.
So Sunday morning, when my frustration at missing the sketching event was getting compounded by loud drum beats coming in from across the street, I decided to cut my losses and did a quick pencil sketch of this guy standing in the portico of the Mandapam. The drum is not a mridangam. It is played standing up and accompanies a Nadaswaram. It sounds pretty good when its not 5 am.

It's nice to be a student again

This last weekend I attended a watercolour workshop by Dhruba Mazumder which I had been looking forward to for weeks and it more than lived up to my expectations. Over the last few years, most of my sketches have been pen and watercolour washes but somehow, while attempting a "pure"watercolour, I found my courage failed me at the end and I added pen strokes to get my desired effect.
The workshop was in a conference room of a hotel and the management very sweetly changed all the bulbs in the lights as we didnt want yellow lights. You can see the white new filaments sticking out and it made a huge difference. Watercolour is all about light!
Dhruba took us step by step, doing small demos and then making us do them ourselves. By the end of the first day I ended up with this.

It's also the first time I'm using any brush other than my travel brush. This one above was done completely with a one and half inch wide flat brush. I had no idea that such big brushes could give such sharp lines. The workshop was very strong on technique and well structured.

By the end of the second day I ended up with this. By then we had covered various types of washes, brush strokes, colour mixing and special effect techniques. More than anything it was so great to be a student and learn something new. Dhruba is a great teacher and I hope I get better with watercolours with practice.

India Votes

We are electing our representatives for the central government today. Who we vote for will determine the Prime minister. The choices are not great but the event itself is quite a spectacle. The 2014 Lok Sabha elections is happening in 9 phases spread over a month and we in Chennai fall into phase 6 today. I come under the South Chennai constituency and within that there are various sub-sub-sub parts that determine where I queue up. Considering South Chennai has 3.5 million voters and the country has 81,45,00,000 people on its electoral roll its quite a management miracle.
I went with my grandmother who is 85 years old and determined to exercise her right. Our polling booth was in a corporation school and 10 residential areas have to come here to vote. The open quadrangle had ten different queues snaking around under the shamiyanas. I had thought I would have plenty of time to dash off many sketches but thanks to my grandmother I was given red carpet treatment. A security guard ushered us in and we were out in five minutes! Actually all the queues were moving pretty fast.

Earlier in the morning I sketched another line of folks waiting to vote in Mylapore just outside my house. This was around 8 in the morning and the line was very very long. Generally the lines are much longer before office starts. All the schools and colleges have to shut as they become polling booths and counting centres. 

Fresh as always

This veggie shop sits at the corner of Chitrakulam and further down you have fruit shops and seasonal carts. The whole area South east of the main Mylapore temple is abuzz with fresh produce and is a great place to sketch. As I walked past this one, the display called out to me. Neat pyramids of tomatoes, potatoes and onions, cascading piles of snake gourd (podalanga), stacks of banana stem (thandu) raw mango, ridge gourd (peerkanga) and bundles of very very green drumsticks.
It was around five in the evening, and the shop next door was not open. There was a table and a bench where the owner would probably arrange his vegetables but he wasn't there so I took the oppurtunity to perch comfortably and get a good view of the inside and the outside of this shop.
Five minutes into the sketch (of course!) the shop owner turned up. But as I sighed inwardly he started watching me sketch and then actually asked me to take my time and finish. He waited till I was done to open his shop!

Delving deeper into Mylapore

I live in Mylapore. My office is in Mylapore. If you take a look at the tags on my blog post, the label "Mylapore" is very recurrent. And the reason is that there is just so much to see. So much stuff that is sketch-worthy. It's the oldest area of the city and in some small pockets within it, time seems to have passed slower.
Take for instance this cycle-rikshaw that I saw at the corner of Chitrakulam. We rarely see these in the centre of the city. Cyclists are so totally sidelined on our roads and a three-wheeler cycle is all but extinct. I remember when, as a school kid I would travel by bus. The last bus stop was two kilometres from our house and if you felt like splurging you could treat yourself to a rikshaw ride - one of these. The drivers were mostly elderly men with sinewy calf muscles. We even had horse-pulled carts but I'm pretty sure I won't be able to find one of those anymore - not even in Mylapore. No, I am not that old. It's just amazing how in barely three decades this city has transformed so rapidly.

Chitrakulam itself is an area within Mylapore. Past the main huge temple complex and the big tank there is a smaller pond called Chitrakulam and some smaller temples. Adi Kesava Perumal Temple, Srinivasa Perumal temple, Vedanta Desikar Temple. I didnt get the time to go into any of them because I finished the first sketch and was enthralled by a very narrow street that I wanted to capture.

This is Chitrakulam south street. Going further in the streets get narrower and I will need to go back another day, delving deeper to sketch those....

A historical link across two weekends

Over two weekends I visited first St Thomas Mount and then the Santhome Basilica. It was mainly because someone in our sketch-group was kind enough to organise sketching permissions at both these places one after the other. But having gone to each place I started reading up about the connections - and was amazed at the variations in the stories that are available.

First off, the basics. St. Thomas Mount is a small hillock near the Chennai Airport. Legend has it that St Thomas, one of the original apostles of Christ came to Kerala in 52 AD and slowly made his way across to Madras where he was killed in 72 AD on the top of that hillock. His body is said to be interred in a tomb in Mylapore over which is built the Santhome Basilica. This is the most popular legend.

There is a Shrine - Our Lady of Expectation - which is a pilgrimage site on the top of the hillock and a winding stairway up to it. Very picturesque and very hot in the mid-day sun. The stairway has resting points and 14 "stations of the cross" along its side which are statues showing Jesus dragging the cross flocked by a small crowd.

As I was there sketching on a sunday, I experienced the full force of the Sunday Mass. As soon as a sermon in English concluded and the people poured out another wave of them would go in and another sermon would begin in Tamil. Once that was over there was one in Hindi and there was one in a European language as well (Portugese? Latin?)

People who came out would walk back down the stairway in groups singing hymns or some would hang around at the top as there was an excellent view of the airport from here. The children especially were endlessly thrilled to watch flights take off and land.

While the legend of St Thomas is questionable, the location is famous for another event which is completely factual and extremely impressive. Colonel William Lambton began the great trigonometrical survey if India from the top of this hillock in 1802. There is a commemorative bust of the great man at the very spot. I felt humbled thinking about the enormity of the task - few dedicated men  holding chain links and spot levels going all across our huge country and coming up with a highly accurate map.

In comparison,  my visit to Santhome was on a saturday and the Basilica was very quiet and peaceful. No matter what the veracity of St. Thomas's presence in India, the building is beautiful and a pleasure to sketch. Oh, and one last thing - did you know that St Thomas is the patron Saint for Architects?!