My Second Blog

I am very glad to say that from the day I decided to do it (towards the end of May 2012)  I have been quite regular with my "30 minute" sketches. In fact so far, on the days when I have not had the time to sketch during my lunch break, I have come home and managed to do one to keep going at almost a sketch a day. And I have been posting these sketches in my second blog to track my progress.

 I am hoping to achieve two things through this exercise: 1. To improve my quick sketching skills. My aim is to be able to sketch fast without sacrificing details (or at least the illusion of details) and to do that with a refined technique, and 2. To develop my watercolour painting skills.


Last Saturday I kept to my resolve to paint every weekend and did one small watercolour sketch - a landscape in monocolour. This one took me about 30 minutes but, when it comes to painting, I have decided not to impose time restrictions on myself since I will only be doing it at home and probably only on weekends.

 I had actually planned to do another one on Sunday but wasn't able to do that. Hopefully I will manage a cople of watercolours this weekend. Let me see...

I propose to share some (but not all) of these quick sketches on this blog too on a weekly basis. If you would like to see the rest of these quick sketches, or if you would like to know anything about the sketches that you see here, you could check out my second blog, Racing Against The Clock.

From Pen & Ink Projects and Challenges to Lunchtime Sketches

I was overwhelmed by the comments that I received for my last post and I thank all of you, the ones who appreciated my sketches and the ones who have encouraged me to take to painting and even offered suggestions on how I could get started. I have taken the suggestions to heart and soon I hope to start posting here in colour too. But, before I get to that I would like to finish what I started, which is a short account of how I have progressed to where I am today.

As I mentioned in my last post it was around 2007 or 2008 that I decided to concentrate on pen & ink. I was already a member at one online art community (WetCanvas) and I joined one more (I Draw & Paint) around this time. At both of these I started participating regularly in the monthly pen & ink projects/challenges. The drawings that you see here are some of those that I did between 2008 and early 2012 at these two communities. 

 Although I am fairly good at self motivation, I cannot overstate how much being a part of these two communities has motivated me to draw and has helped me develop my skills.

During this time I also tried my hand at watercolour a few times. These two were done late in 2010 and unfortunately, due to my lack of confidence in wielding a brush and the effort involved in setting up to paint, I have not put in the necessary time and effort since then to take my painting skills any further. Hopefully that will change now because I have drawn up an action plan to which I am publicly committing myself.

During the three months and more since my last post I spent hardly any time painting, drawing or even sketching. Finally, about two weeks ago, I decided to at least do one lunchtime sketch at work each day and post it in a new blog (to track my progress). I am happy to say that I have been fairly regular so far at this. Starting today I also plan to play with colour over the weekends and see where that takes me.

My thanks, once again, for your good wishes and encouragement.

Thiruvanmiyur Beach

When we first moved into this part of Chennai we lived in a newly built house right on the seashore, as caretakers for the owners who were living abroad. We had one elderly lady living next door, and a locked up empty house on the other side as our immediate neighbors. There was also a fishing village nearby and much of their daily activity took place on the beach right in front of our home.

The access roads to this area of the city were not well developed, and the entire area used to be desolate at night. Many of my friends and relatives thought that we were mad to leave "civilization" so far behind, but my wife and I loved living here.

Originally the house owners were supposed to come back to India only several years later, but suddenly their plans changed and we had to vacate the house for them. It was then that we decided to build our own home in the same area. We were sort of pushed into taking the plunge a little earlier than we otherwise might have, but in the end it proved to be a good thing for us. Land prices and construction costs suddenly soared, but only after we had bought our land and built our house.

Today, over thirty years later, this part of the city is very much sought after as one of the nicer communities to live in. The high cost of land has resulted in most of the housing being in the form of apartment buildings. As a result, although the beach is relatively unspoiled, it is very crowded in the evenings.

Another big change that I notice is in the type of fishing vessels. In the 1970s the local fishermen went out to sea in catamarans. The word catamaran comes from the Tamil "kattu maram" which means tied wood. The fishermen used to go out to sea on raft-like boats made by tying a bunch of logs together. You can see what these catamarans used to look like in my sketch painting. But now, most fishermen use fiberglass boats, and quite a few of them even use mechanized boats.

The fishing village has grown and therefore there are more boats beached up on the sand these days. And Chennai being a very hot and humid place the beach is an extremely popular open space for the entire community.

Unfortunately this beach is now threatened by an unwanted development. There is a proposal to run an elevated roadway for many kilometers over this beach. The objective is to cut the driving time for people going from the city to the southern suburbs of the city and to a tourist destination to the south of Chennai. The fishing communities, the residents of many of the affected neighborhoods, and environmentalists have all protested but is so far unclear whether these protests will even be heard.

Breaking the silence

Every New Year I make a few resolutions. I write them down on a piece of paper and at the end of the year I check to see how many of them I have actually managed to keep. At the end of 2009, amongst other things I resolved to post to my blog more frequently than I had done in 2009. Although, when I checked at the end of 2010, my success rate with the rest of my resolutions was reasonably high, this was one resolution where I had failed miserably. I had managed to post only twice during the entire year.

Meanwhile my wife, daughter, and a few friends who had been following my posts had all been at me every now and then asking me why I had stopped posting stuff. The point was that through my blog I wish to share not only my thoughts, opinions, information & trivia, but also at least one of my sketches with every post. And unfortunately, during the first half of 2010, as it happens to me during the first half of every calendar year, I had not found the time to do much sketching. By the time I was back at my hobby, it had already been many months since I had posted anything, and inertia had set in.

Re-activating my blog and posting regularly were therefore on my list of resolutions once again, this time for 2011. But again, a third of the year 2011 went by before I have finally got down to it. Hopefully I will be able to sustain it this time.

During my extended period of blogging inactivity my daughter tried to nudge me back on track with a Brahma Book which is the Indian version of a moleskin sketchbook. I started using it promptly and I carry it faithfully with me every single day. The sketch that I am sharing is one of the first that I did in this book. It shows my home, located in a quiet seaside community in Chennai. Unfortunately there is a distinct possibility that it may not remain calm and quiet very much longer. More of that in a subsequent post.