Madhubani painting - Dancing Ganesha on handmade paper

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Madhubani - Kalamkari Ganesha on hand made paper

This is not an original painting. It is a reproduction of Naatiya Ganesha I came across in the exotic Indian art gallery.

Somu and I have been wanting to put up a home tour for the last 2 years. Some how I have been postponing it as I am yet to fill up some walls with something interesting. One such wall is the entrance foyer and I finally managed to paint for it. I decided on Madhubani which has always been my favorite art style.

Dancing Ganesha - Madhubani design on hand made paper

This time I chose madhubani style with kalamkari color combination on some left over hand made paper. For my earlier Ram - Seetha madubani painting, I had used acrylic colors. So it was quite easy this time. Acrylic works the best on handmade paper as the density is not as heavy as oil or as low as water colors.

Madhubani  painting - A closer View

As for the thinner, I prefer acrylic gloss medium  as it prevents blotting of hand made paper. The outline on the entire image was made using black felt tip pen. So here goes - Madhubani Dancing Ganesha in our entrance foyer. 

Ganesha - Acrylic painting

We wanted to save some time and did not want to indulge in DIY photo framing. Since we wanted the frame to match the rest of the framing that we did for the other paintings at home, we gave that task to our regular framing vendor. 

Your turn now : Tell me how you like the painting. Good, bad or otherwise, please leave your comment. It will fuel my passion and make me want to do more.

~ Preethi

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You may also be interested in our other works in the entrance foyer

• Embroidery Door hanging
• A lampshade make over in 15 minutes
• A personalized paper mache name board

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Linking in : Colours Dekor

- Somu

Wall decor - Choosing between a new DIY and an old painting

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A plain wall needing embellishment can certainly set off the DIY instinct in us. While creating a new piece of art is the most obvious choice, we sometimes tend to forget our works from the past that are crying to get out from the dark insides of their designated storage space. More often than not, everything that is preserved tends to get ignored and lose to our own yearning to craft something new and more creative. Such discrimination is usually meted towards work we believe isn't our best. 

We may have moved on from being a novice, but it gives no reason to disregard our previous work as a rookie. It may have its imperfections, but every work of art that is our own is a masterpiece in its own right and deserves to be proudly displayed on a wall or a glass case where everyone can see.

Old floral painting from the archives (2003)

Floral water color painting
Revived, framed and displayed (2011)

Do you agree? Would you rather work on a new project than to resurrect an old work of yours? How do you ensure all your work get that much deserved showcase space? Share your views. We would love to know your point of view.

Note : This painting is a reproduction that I painted way back in 2003. If you do know that original artist, please do drop me an e-mail at woodoozmagic@gmail.com

~ Preethi


P.S. Linking in : Lines Across my face, Colours Dekor

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- Somu

Madhubani Wall Hanging

All Blog DIY hand made paper Madhubani Painting wall hanging

My fetish for Madhubani painting continues.. Although we shifted to our new house 2 years back, decorating it happened in phases and is still happening. We still have to adorn our walls with interesting art pieces. One such wall was the partition between the living and master bedroom. I found a beautiful Madhubani wall hanging in My Dream Canvas and was completely awed by it. We had leftovers of hand made paper that we bought for our earlier projects.

Madubani Painting

Madubani Wall hanging

You would get handmade papers in Fab India. We purchased ours from Auroville on Cathedral road, chennai. The problem with hand made paper- water or oil based painting cannot be done. It has to be acrylic and I used acrylic thinner as the medium. To give it a 'close-to-original' look, I used just the basic colors. (In the past, people only used vegetable dyes and hence had fewer color options). So here it is - Ram and sita who are the subjects in most Madhubani paintings.

We couldn't wait for the framed pictures to get displayed. It took less than 10 minutes for it to get installed making an electric drill a handy tool to have at home :)

~ Preethi

P.S. Linking in : Colours Dekor, Lines Across my Face, Kreative Korner, Savvy Southern Style, @ the picket fence

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- Somu

Embroidery... Door hanging

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I am very excited about getting my hands on some needles and thread this time. We were needing a traditional looking door hanging and I decided to make one. I spent some time in choosing the color of the fabric and the thread. My obvious choice was to go with a red fabric with traditional colors like chrome yellow, turquoise blue and leaf green. Things one would need are: Embroidery hoop/ring, needles, Floss/color threads, scissors, fabric, decorative mirrors, golden bells (I got them from RS Stores, LB Road, Adyar).

Embroidery

I started the project by sticking a sheet of newspaper at the back of the fabric basically to make it stiff. We had a simple design in mind and started with the borders in black. The design you see has back stitches in black and cross stitches in green for the borders. The second layer was done with chain stitches in blue. I filled up the center by sticking the mirrors to form a pattern and outlined each with Abla embroidery. It was a very time consuming exercise but it was worth it. As there was a lot of gap between these mirror patterns, I filled it up with small flower and leaf designs using chain and fish scale stitches. The outcome was decent enough and we hung it in our door way.

Hand Embroidery - Door Hanging

I feel little satisfied and nice every time we step into the house and see some vibrant colors warmly welcoming us. It was a great experience and now I am simply thinking of the next idea.

- Somu