Tints & Shades

Today’s class topic was tints and shades. We divided the class into two parts. In the first 30-40 minutes we introduced the concepts of monotone painting, tints, hues and how to achieve them.

The students created first created a series of 5 hues, followed by a series of 5 tints. This was done simultaneously along with the demonstration by the teacher.

In the second part of the class we begun by explaining the basic concepts of motifs, composition planning and thumbnails. Then we assigned the students to make a design using a motif they created, 4 wavy lines and a combination of ascending tints and descending shades.

Figure Drawing

All seven students who attended this class were trying figure drawing for the first time.

by UT-22, men’s prison Byculla

We started by first explaining the basic proportions of the human body.

We then proceeded to explain the type of poses that work best for a gesture drawing session.

After that, the students started posing one by one. We started with 30 second poses for the first half of the class. The rest of the class tried to capture the gesture on their papers.

In the second half of the class, we increased the duration of each pose to 60 seconds. The added time allowed students to add greater detail and accuracy to their drawings. By the conclusion of the class, one could see the incremental growth in everyone’s drawings.

Studio Ghibli

This week’s class was inspired by Studio Ghibli and it’s founder-creator Hayao Miyazaki.

We made self-portraits in Ghibli style. Simple lines, clean design, and introducing some shadow.

What Ghibli is to me

by Kishan Dev who led the Studio Ghibli class in the men’s prison:

“What took me by surprise was how original the film was. In contrast of all the western world, Miyazaki was not in a hurry. ”

— Kishan Dev, Art Educator, Byculla Prison

It was around the year 2000 when I first heard the name Miyazaki. I was working in a 2D animation studio. We had a culture of showing rare animation to each other

a copy of a Ghibli frame by UT-79 in the women’s prison

What took me by surprise was how original the film was. In contrast of all the western world, Miyazaki was not in a hurry. The protagonist , a little girl sat on a small wooden bridge , and watching the water passing by under the drain. Water is so clear that you can see through. There is a glass bottle in drain. Some glass blades and few tiny fishes. Fishes go in and out of the bottle as water flows over it. The little girl just sits there enjoying the view. There is no rush.

That part of film making that is lost now. My interest in Miyazaki kept growing over the years. He was not a one film wonder, he kept coming back with new stories. Stories that took me back to my childhood. I kept trying to decode what makes him so great.

a frame from “Spirited Away” by Studio Ghibli

“So , the Ghibli is not a cartoon image, it’s a small town where stories grow organically. ”

— Kishan Dev, Art Educator, Byculla Prison

I came to know he does his own storyboards. He sits inside a small room, storyboarding the scene as he is trying to process the story. His story is dynamic. He does not know the end when he starts creating. He is exploring on the page. His boards are in detail. There are sheets lying down on floor. Some of his own ideas, rejected drafts.

The men’s class focused on designing magical companions, based on their fears or dislikes. Demo sketch created by Kishan Dev.

He takes a break, may be cook noodles, stands in balcony , smokes a cigarette, and goes back in the room.

At the end of the day, he emerges and shows the boards to his team. He is still processing the story, he is still trying to crack it while everyday instances still influence him.

Storyboarding is not a drawing skill. Storyboard is writing a story visually. The Japanese animation industry understands that well.

At core Ghibli or Japan has this culture of creative freedom. By culture the process of storytelling is unfiltered. That’s what makes it so good. The director/writer is not responsible to anyone.

He/she is alone with the idea. It is a creative heaven. They figured a way to make film making a non-collaborative medium. It’s one man vision. A journey as unadulterated as possible.

So, the Ghibli is not a cartoon image, it’s a small town where stories grow organically. That’s why the world responds to these stories. There is no pressure on them to be “profitable” stories, political stories, ideological war fare stories or the moral stories. They are just stories. That’s what is Ghibli style.

Cosmic Doodles

This week our class travelled back to ancient India, to learn about the millennia-old doodle art form — mandala drawing. Mandalas have spiritual significance in Hinduism and Buddhism. Practitioner of this art form channel cosmic forces into their patterns as they enter a meditative headspace and doodle into patterned shapes.

Symbolic of the wholeness of the universe in its ideal form, mandala drawing spread along the Silk Road as a tool for meditation and achieving focus. Our guest teacher Supriya Doshi brought the ancient wisdom of the cosmic doodle to Byculla prison this week. An architect by training, Supriya practices mandala drawing and believes it signifies the transformation of human suffering into joy.

created by a prisoner at Byculla Women’s Jail

“Mandala drawing engages the brains intellectual and artistic aspects and builds inner strength.” Supriya said. She introduced symbology of the form — the wheel with spokes, the lotus, flowers, leaves, and patterns and explained the meanings of different lines and patterns in the mandala tradition.

“The mandala gives a person a sacred space to meet their inner self” Supriya writes in her class notes.

This class was extremely popular — many new people joined in and many asked us for more patterns and designs so they could keep making these drawings in their own time.

The following week, they came running at us with papers flying in the air “ma’am look at my my drawing.”

Figure Drawing

In this class, students took turns posing in the middle of a circle, while rest of the class drew them. Each pose was 30 seconds. One after the other group called on each other, and as the class went on the poses grew more and more expressive and daring. Everyone wanted to see how the rest of the class had drawn them.

This exercise really bonded the group. As women in the neighbouring barracks saw what was happening, they came to out watch the class. Some asked for paper and joined in. Others pushed their way into the middle of the circle to pose so their fellow prisoners could draw them.

From our first figure drawing class in the women’s prison

We wanted them to start to organise and compose, make stories and spaces from their drawings. So for the second half of the class, we gave each person a prompt — draw a park, a funfair, a circus, a classroom — and asked them to use the poses they had come up with as a “bank” of ideas to fill up the page and create a busy, congested space, like in Where’s Wally and similar illustrations. The goal was just to practice drawing lots of figures, without worrying too much about the details

The men’s prison has done a figure class in the past and it was a huge success. I’d wanted to try it in the women’s but was holding back because we don’t have enough drawing boards. Ideally I would have loved to introduce figure drawing on large sheets of paper with charcoal so that we could also get into form, shadows and gesture.

Nevertheless, we broke through the hesitation our class has had in drawing the human form. Because the limitation here was time, speed and not perfection was was the focus of each drawing.

Matisse

Henri Matisse, Sketch for Le Bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life), 1905-6

What a wonderful class we had this week. We introduced the work of Henri Matisse and built a class around using colour for expression and not just description. Then I gave everyone a pre-selected colour palette of 5 colours which I had printed from this website. Aniruddhe suggested we turn this into a lucky draw — that definitely added a ton of excitement to the class.

After Matisse visited Morocco he began drawing a lot of goldfish. The story goes that people there used to sit around for hours staring at goldfish and he was fascinated by that. And so he started painting them.

I asked everyone to mix the colours they had been given on their palettes. They had never ever done this before — but they couldn’t wait to try. All I told them was the basic rules of mixing

red+blue=purple

red+yellow=orange

blue+yellow=orange

To go darker add black, to go lighter add white

To go warmer go yellow, to go cooler add blue

created by some one in our class

Most did it intuitively, without needing too much help. One or two people didn’t get it right in the beginning. I told them — think of it as though you’re making daal. You don’t get it perfect the first time! By the end, everyone had mixed their colours and with impressive accuracy.

Some people who struggled asked other women in the class for help. They worked together to get the colour recipes just right and once they had them, they knew exactly how to make them again.

Their next task was to let the colours inspire the composition. Some started by just dabbing random marks on the page and seeing what came out of it. Others had a very clear image in their mind associated with those colours. It really felt like we broke a barrier in this class.

One of the students said in the beginning she didn’t know what to make. She made a random mark with her brush and it looked to her like a person. So she drew a sea of people in the same way. Then she wanted to give the whole thing some message, so she painted Savitribai Phule to show how much impact she had had on so many people. She felt, she said, like she was joining forces with the universe - that she had made the picture in a collaboration with randomness.

A student’s picture of Savitribai Phule

There was one new student today. It was her first day in prison. She was in a state of shock, completely frozen. Sitting with everyone, she began mixing colours, and the women told her loud and clear in front of me. “Cheer up, when we come here we park our sadness somewhere. We come, we spend a few hours having fun.”

This was music to my ears. Joy is so important. Frivolity is so, so important for survival. Escapism is also a part of it, and we need that too. I hope she comes back next week.

Value

We changed the class subject from ‘Shapes’ to ‘Values’ just a few hours prior to the class starting. Although we had decided on a couple of activities, most of the class flow had to be improvised.

Activity 1:  Shading squares with values ascending from 1 to 12. 1 being white and 12 being black. 12 was an arbitrary number, however it stuck with the students. I introduced the concept of bunching values as light (1-4), medium (5-8) and dark (9-12). But the students seemed to prefer the number system.

A range of values in charcoal, by one of our students

I believe all students understood how value is to be observed and represented. Each student was self-motivated enough to re-do the activity till they achieved a desirable outcome, using both charcoal and pencil. In future classes, the light, medium and dark terminology will need to be emphasized further. 

Activity 2: Introduction to still life. We used a paper octahedron to demonstrate how, based on light sources, each visible face of the octahedron was visually of a different value.  Placing the octahedron in direct sunlight, students were introduced to the concept of observing shadows and transitions in value. 

The octahedron was a bad choice of shape for this activity, but I had to use it as it was the only model we had available today. I demonstrated how to render this shape and its shadow. On doing the activity, I realized that it would be too difficult for the students to replicate. Nonetheless, they were all eager to give it a go. None of them were successful. I’m hopeful the activity will at least nudge them towards being active observers of light. This activity can be re-attempted using a simple sphere or cube. The activity was a partial failure but is a good indication that still-life is something that students will take interest in.

I followed this up with a 15-minute demonstration. I sketched a value study, using 3 values, directly observing the premises. Students were asked to simply observe.

The last 20-30 minutes were spent going through student sketchbooks and sharing a couple of sketches from my sketchbook. I used my sketches to show how a value study helps in making a full-colour sketch.

An additional positive observation was that a group of 6-7 policemen stopped by our classroom and appeared genuinely curious to understand the activities I was teaching. Their line of questioning has changed from ‘why are you doing this?’ to ‘how and what do you plan to teach?’.

Colour

Picking up from the texture class from last time , I thought let’s put a discipline in training. The while making texture class was playful this time I wanted to take that away and introduce a session where they know how to use brush. How to manage colours. What the colour in bottle made of. The elegance of holding a brush and why we hold it like that. So we gave them a space to fill. Which could have been quite boring on paper but we made it interesting by turning in into a challenge.

As expected the clumsy nature of many automatically came in control. They understood the importance of brush tip.

When the mixing was over I introduced making mark with a brush. Like a line and a circle. I believe in real world where they all will have to struggle for a job, if only they knew calligraphy their chances of getting a job goes high. So while making these marks with brush I showed them how can these marks unable them to do calligraphy. One of the students took it well and started mimicking my brush strokes. The way he holds brush i know he has had training. He is interested and can grow faster.

Mixing colour was new to many and they found it an interesting thing. They do struggle with vocabulary or colour names because most names are in english.

Frida Kahlo

Women’s day was around the corner, so we did a class on Frida Kahlo. I told my class the story of the streetcar accident that led to a life in pain, the loneliness and isolation that spurred her iconic self-portraits, and the stormy relationship with her husband Diego who broke her heart over and over again. We looked at her self-portaits, all the many ways in which she saw herself, and how from the isolation of her hospital bed she lived out all her fantasies through painting.

Frida Kahlo’s self portaits inspired our women’s day art class in prison

Since it was women’s day, we asked our class to give themselves the gifts they want to receive — in their paintings. The women gave themselves colourful clothes and flowers in their hair. Some showed their backs as they left jail, others draped their self-portraits in leaves we had brought in for collage.

Lines

From a teacher’s notebook

How does a line convey an emotion?

The distance between point a and point b is a geography of emotions. In this class, we explored how a line can make you feel.

From a teacher’s notebook

The Great Wave

I love the idea of travelling without moving. This week we started using art as a mode of transport — travelling back in time to Edo (Tokyo) in 1639. Years of civil war came to a close with the rise of the Tokugawa shoguns. While European ships are setting sail to the rest of the world, one tiny country closes its borders to the world. Japan in the Edo period is cut off, confined and almost entirely isolated in this era of colonisation and globalisation. For the next 200 years, Japan was shut off from the world — leaving and entering the country was punishable by death. In these conditions emerged a unique and quintessential Japanese art movement of printmaking.

It was a hot day, and I had a bad throat, but my class was really immersed in the storytelling. I told them about the emergence of the new floating world, the “ukiyo-e” along with a newly wealthy merchant class that prospered in these years of stability. New money meant money to spend, and so rose the kabuki theatre and geisha districts. I showed my class the woodcut block prints that proliferated in that period. None of them had ever seen The Great Wave before — and when I told them its one of the most printed images in the world, they were really interested to take a good look at it. I explained to them why the image made such an impact at the time — the low horizon line and perspective that resembled European styles, the representation of destabilisation that Japan was experiencing.

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), Fugaku sanjurokkei (Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji)

Then I introduced them to the artist Katsushika Hokusai — I told them about how he rose to fame because he had used the ukiyo workshops that produced prints of actors and prostitutes and to start making landscapes and prints of ordinary Japanese people. Then I showed them his 36 views of Mount Fuji — and we talked about how he looked at one thing from so many different points of view.

I wanted to give them the experience of printmaking — and so I had them carve designs into sheets of foil. (We’re not allowed to bring sharp tools into the prison, otherwise we could have done so many things here!) I asked them to create their own 36 views of Mumbai.