Ganesh sculpting
Another year, and the festival for the elephant god would be back to entertain us for a fortnight. A couple of years back, I thought of doing something different and made a ganesha idol myself. At the time it was my first attempt and so the end result looked cartoony but wonderful too.
At my dad's 70th birthday celebrations, we had hired a photographer -Bharat- who later shared with me his interest in making idols for the festival and showed a picture of what he had made. This got me interested, got the needed information from him of where to get the raw materials (esp. Shaadu mud).
In the first week of September, got off my slumber and walked down to Alaka talkies chowk to the idol makers shop and bought my self a couple of kilos of shaadu mitti. This mud was not very fine and had a few broken pieces of other idols, I was told by the shopkeeper to beat the mud fine before embarking on my attempt.
Back home, The process started with me first beating the mud very fine- this involved wrapping the raw mud in a rag and pounding it with a stone and eventually filtering the same. Once this was done, I got down to the next step of adding water and making a dough out of it. As it turned out this was a tough step and my hands hurt. Eventually with the dough ready I got down to work and a couple of hours had a good structure for the ganesha idol ready. The base platform, mouse and the turban too was moulded and they looked nice.
The next phase was to let the sculpture dry for over a week. My idea was to paint the same with natural colours and hence keep it as natural as possible. For this I decided to use multani mitti for the base coat and also the skin colour. Kumkum ,kajal, turmeric for other colours.
To get a good colour bind for the multani colour, I had to mix the multani mitti with colour glue and water this ensured the final coat did not peel off. Once this was done, again left it to dry for a couple of days. Then started the first cot with kumkum, but this turned out disastrous, as the shade once dried did not look appealing at all. My idea was for the sculpture to be in multani brown with reddish-brown shades to mark the features and edges. But this did not look very good.
The following day, I decided to make use of fabric colours to paint the idol and do away with the shade approach. This process did not last too long, but was a little tedious, since, for one I am not a good painter and two the parts were small and the fine brushes I was using were too old and were misbehaving (the hair on the brush would not stick together ) at times. Lastly the most scary part of the idol was to paint the eyes. This is the most tricky and defining part for the sculpture. If the eyes don't look good, the whole sculpture no matter how wonderful would never look appealing.
Finally with deep breaths took the plunge and started with the eyes. Sitting as close to the sculpture as possible and being as confident and tentative at the same time 'got the base colour of white done for defining the shape and background of the eye, then came the blue iris dotted with the black pupil. Finally came the outer eye shading followed by the eyebrow. The eyes looked nice, I was releaved. The mouse and turban were stuck in place with quick glue and walla! The idol was done!
At my dad's 70th birthday celebrations, we had hired a photographer -Bharat- who later shared with me his interest in making idols for the festival and showed a picture of what he had made. This got me interested, got the needed information from him of where to get the raw materials (esp. Shaadu mud).
In the first week of September, got off my slumber and walked down to Alaka talkies chowk to the idol makers shop and bought my self a couple of kilos of shaadu mitti. This mud was not very fine and had a few broken pieces of other idols, I was told by the shopkeeper to beat the mud fine before embarking on my attempt.
Back home, The process started with me first beating the mud very fine- this involved wrapping the raw mud in a rag and pounding it with a stone and eventually filtering the same. Once this was done, I got down to the next step of adding water and making a dough out of it. As it turned out this was a tough step and my hands hurt. Eventually with the dough ready I got down to work and a couple of hours had a good structure for the ganesha idol ready. The base platform, mouse and the turban too was moulded and they looked nice.
The next phase was to let the sculpture dry for over a week. My idea was to paint the same with natural colours and hence keep it as natural as possible. For this I decided to use multani mitti for the base coat and also the skin colour. Kumkum ,kajal, turmeric for other colours.
To get a good colour bind for the multani colour, I had to mix the multani mitti with colour glue and water this ensured the final coat did not peel off. Once this was done, again left it to dry for a couple of days. Then started the first cot with kumkum, but this turned out disastrous, as the shade once dried did not look appealing at all. My idea was for the sculpture to be in multani brown with reddish-brown shades to mark the features and edges. But this did not look very good.
The following day, I decided to make use of fabric colours to paint the idol and do away with the shade approach. This process did not last too long, but was a little tedious, since, for one I am not a good painter and two the parts were small and the fine brushes I was using were too old and were misbehaving (the hair on the brush would not stick together ) at times. Lastly the most scary part of the idol was to paint the eyes. This is the most tricky and defining part for the sculpture. If the eyes don't look good, the whole sculpture no matter how wonderful would never look appealing. 
Labels: intrests, MajorActivity
posted by vindy | 1:04 AM
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