This weekend being a long one, I took my son and parents out to Bannerghatta zoo. For all the animals and people that I saw there, it was the unassuming yet ubiquitous bamboo that caught my attention. What an amazingly random arrangement - each shoot tilting in its own angle and yet all of them when put together form such a lovely composition.
So as always true for me – I had the urge to pour out what I saw of the bamboos onto paper!
This is the result of that urge. J
I used acrylic paints over a sheet of acrylic primed oil sketching paper. This also seemed like the perfect fit for a knife panting – the strokes for drawing the shoots are all entirely knife.
I started with an outline of the shoots and angles at which I wanted to represent them. Then I painted the entire sheet with a lemon yellow background.
Next, using sap green, lemon yellow and white – I started applying the layers on the bamboo shoots – with a painting knife. Once the shoots were finalized, I started to paint the leaves. I started with a smaller painting knife and then the finishing was done with a brush. The leaves are hooker’s green.
Finally to add a little more depth, I mixed raw umber with hooker’s green to give padding between the shoots, and in some places outlining the shoots too.
All of that took me about an hour’s time.