A Royal Elephant.

Homesick (for my hubby), desperately wanting to go back home...but visa requirements necessitate staying for some more time....ahh well!!
                                          In the meantime, trying to keep busy. Here goes..

     

Fantasy Creatures: Mermaid

Mermaids have fascinated mankind ever since man first ventured out in the oceans. I wonder who first described a mermaid and what made him (I am assuming it was a man who saw gorgeous fish-women in the waves; a woman seafarer would definitely have seen a handsome merman) imagine a woman who was half fish. Perhaps he had been a long time at sea and was lost in the thoughts of his young lady and that made his imagination run riot, perhaps it was some trick of the sun on waves or it is possible that he really saw a mermaid.

             Mermaids may even have been friendly to humans initially, but they came to know the humans too well after only a short while; and very wisely, they decided to retreat to deeper waters and not show themselves anymore to humans. Hmmm....

Here's Miss Mermaid with a Trident.

Peacock

       Made a peacock in henna style...ink on paper. This is not the final version. I want to finish the image in photoshop and add an off white background before getting it printed, but I don't know how to do that in photoshop yet (I'm a little technologically handicapped).
           Meanwhile, I have to be satisfied with pen and paper.

                                                                         

Also working on a series of fantasy creatures...coming up next..

Hello all ! Its been quite a while since my last post (close to a year, I think). Blame it on the massive change in shifting countries and moving home and hearth to a new country - a beautiful country called Ukraine with beautiful people, beautiful flowers and strange weather (strange to me!). I long to write about all I've seen and experienced here but that is another story, for another time.
       Meanwhile, I've been staying mostly at home and exploring many new art forms. The one that I've discovered most recently is an old tradition from my own country, India. It is the tradition of applying mehndi or henna. Mehndi is traditionally applied to the palms of a girl just before her marriage. There are all sorts of stories and beliefs associated with it, such as the darker the colour of mehndi on a girl's palm, the more love she receives from her husband/mother-in-law and many others.
                  Apart from being a sweet tradition, the designs and patterns of mehndi are simply beautiful. Literally, they are simple and very beautiful. Most of the designs consist of repetition of simple loops, swirls, dots and paisleys. Peacocks are a common motif seen in most designs, as are bride and bridegroom. I tried a few mehndi designs on my sketchbook and was happy with the results. In this post I am showing two of my earliest attempts. More will follow in later posts. 

Paisleys in myriad sizes.

                                     
                                           A henna tattoo design.