Knowledge to Creations
Warli Art
The Warlis or Varlis are an indigenous tribe or 'Adivasis', living in mountainous as well as coastal areas of Maharashtra-Gujarat border and surrounding areas, in western part of India. The Warlis carry on a tradition stretching back to 2500 or 3000 BCE. Their mural paintings are similar to those done between 500 and 10,000 BCE.
Everything about Warli is earthy and soothing. It takes you back to the painting’s provenance where you could almost smell the wet soil, feel the touch of the calloused hand that painted the background and admire meticulous brush stroke of the rural artist who created the master piece. Warli paintings succeed in adding elegance to a rural hut or a five star hotel lobby with the same charm.
Their extremely rudimentary wall paintings use a very basic graphic vocabulary: a circle, a triangle and a square. The central motive in these ritual paintings is surrounded by scenes portraying hunting, fishing and farming, festivals and dances, trees and animals. Human and animal bodies are represented by two triangles joined at the tip; the upper triangle depicts the trunk and the lower triangle the pelvis.
The ritual paintings are usually done inside the huts. The walls are made of a mixture of branches, earth and cow dung, making a Red Ochre background for the wall paintings. The Warli use only white for their paintings. Their white pigment is a mixture of rice paste and water with gum as a binding. They use a bamboo stick chewed at the end to make it as supple as a paintbrush. The wall paintings are done only for special occasions such as weddings or harvests.
Courtsey: Wikipedia.
Oil Painting
Oil painting is the process of painting with colored pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. Commonly used drying oils include linseed oil or walnut oil. The choice of oil imparts a range of properties to artwork, such as the sheen, the amount of yellowing or drying time. Turpentine can also be an oil medium used, as it is quick to evaporate, allowing the artwork to dry faster. The paints themselves also develop a particular consistency depending on the medium used.
While it takes longer for each coat of paint to dry, the advantage of oil colors is that it gives the artist a lot of flexibility in mixing the colors while working on the art piece, rendering the final work the desired shades and textures.
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This is my most favourite medium to work with.
Acrylic Painting
Acrylic paints have a versatile use, in the sense that they can be used on most of the surfaces out there, like paper, fabric, plastic, glass or metal. They are water soluble when wet, hence can also be thinned using water, to help the paint spread better. The beauty of these paints is that the work of art becomes water resistant after drying, hence can be easily kept clean using a damp cloth.
Acrylic paints provide the flexibilty to the artist to give the work of art the look of a water colour painting, by thinning the paint using water, or give a variety of textures and dimensions, by using the paints with thicker brush strokes. On smoother surfaces like metal or glass, acrylic paints can simply be scraped/peeled off cleanly to redo a section.
