Series- Gajra

The final assignment was to do a series. I chose to do a series on Gajra (jasmine flower garland). I made 3 paintings in this series. I used impasto technique for the figures. The background is the rangoli design.

 Woman making Gajra

Girl selling Gajra

Woman wearing gajra

Week 15- Final

Our final project was to photograph alphabets in nature. I chose to find alphabets in plants. I found many in my backyard. I made a video of the alphabets.
Here is the link to my video.
http://vimeo.com/94719704

Week 14- Portrait

My nephew was visiting, so I took his pictures for this assignment. He let me take pictures of him. Most of the time he never noticed that I was taking his pictures.

Studio

This was the biggest moment of my life. Yori Seeger approached me to ask if I was interested in renting a studio in his new school, School of Visual Philosophy. I was thrilled that I could independently pursue art. I said Yes. It took another year to acquire the space and start the school. The grand opening of the school was on 2nd May. Lots of people came. Now I have my own space to work on several art mediums, oil, acrylic, watercolor, wood, sculpture, etc, etc.
My daughter helped me paint the studio. My friend loaned me her table.

Week 13- Light painting

This was a fun assignment. I never knew that one could paint with light. It created unexpected results. I did this in the backyard and inside the house.

Week 12- Abstract

Since it is was abstract, I took some close up pictures of objects, that they were not recognizable.

Also there was blood moon too this week. Tried to take a picture with limited range of my camera.

Week 11- Photojournalism

My daughter had participated in a dance competition this week, so I decided to take some pictures of her getting ready with her group and dancing. I took the pictures first in color and then converted to black and white in photoshop.

Week 9- Nature of Light

This assignment was interesting. We had to take picture of the same subject three times a day, morning, afternoon and evening. Also the requirement was a bright sunny day. However, it was primarily cloudy that week. Somehow one day there was sunlight throughout the day. So I was able to take the pictures.

Dictionary painting- Menthol

Another interesting concept. A random word is chosen from the dictionary and then a painting is made from that word. I got the word Menthol. I used the chemical structure of menthol to do this painting. I used actual menthol crystals.

Week 7- Post process

We were given an image and we were supposed to process it either by using Lightroom or Photoshop. I used photoshop.

Before

After

Week 6- Shallow depth of field

I really enjoyed this assignment. I was finally able to understand how to take closeup pictures. I took the picture of the raindrops while I was sitting inside the car. I was thrilled to get the butterfly up close in my backyard. The blossom is from the backyard too.

Raindrops

Plum blossom

Butterfly

Blueberry blossom

Week 5- Great depth of field

In and around San Jose.

Map Painting

This was an interesting concept. We were told to convert a map into something different. I soaked it in water, then made paper out of it. I drew flowers on it. I also folded it into fan. Then I made people out of it. After all this I arranged it on the canvas. But the challenge now was to make it something meaningful. This turned out to be very difficult. In the end, I decided to do Yosemite. We used to go there almost every year.