Indian Miniature painting revisited Class 4

Today we are starting the finer painting of the elephant, in the way that my teacher Sam called ''invisible shading'' she would use walnut ink and dilute it out with water to get a very pale brown colour and start layering an area. In the beginning you can hardly see any colours but after she works in an area for a while the shading would become very noticeable. She recommends that we use a clean paper to cover the parts that we are not shading to keep it clean.

 

This i smy first attempt, unfortunately it looks more like pencil shading, and it is less subtle than Sam's. And another frustrating thing about this is it is quite hard to gauge how to get the pale brown colour so it is neither too dark nor pale, and that the brush is neither too wet or dry. Sam reassures me that it is a learning process and it will take sometime to gauge it. She also suggests that we always test it on the paper before applying it directly to the drawing. So for the rest of the class we all try to learn to shade properly.