Gurudongmar Lake and Zero point - water colour study works

"All my life through, the new sights of nature made me rejoice like a child." Marie Curie

The above quote says exactly what I feel while I am in the arms of nature. My recent visit to North Sikkim made my dream come true as I got the opportunity to visit Gurudongmar lake, Yumthang valley and Zero point. Words cannot express the beauty of these places and as I always write in my posts, one has to be there to feel it and live it.

I captured the beauty of north Sikkim in my Camera ( Cannon and Sony ). Gurudongmar lake is the second highest lake in India, at a height of 17100 feet above sea level. It is one of the most beautiful, spectacular and sacred lakes surrounded on all sides by snow capped mountains.

Legend has it that, Guru Padmasambhava ( also known as Guru Dongmar ), touched and sanctified the lake, and thus even in extreme winter, a portion of the lake does not freeze. The lake is also one of the sources of river Teesta, which flows through Sikkim, West Bengal and Bangladesh to merge with the Bay of Bengal.

Given below are a few water colour study works of Gurudongmar lake and scenes from Zero Point in north Sikkim. Study works help me to understand the composition, brush strokes, colour mixing etc so that when late I am trying to recreate the same scene on a larger scale I will know the exact technique to follow.

Gurudongmar Lake 

Study works on cartridge sheet

Size 4" X 5"

At Zero point ( North Sikkim ) 

Study works on cartridge sheet

Size 4" X 5"

After having done the "Study works" where in I tried out different techniques to get the scene as desired, I shall now decide on creating a larger painting on "Arches 300gsm cold pressed paper". 

I purchased a few sheets of Arches paper some months back but have somehow not gathered the courage to start on it. It is an expensive paper and I wanted to have the free and loose brush movements, and a little bit of experience in handling the water colour medium. It is time now to shift from handmade paper to Arches and I will know the difference once I paint on it. I would love to create a "Gurudongmar lake" painting on it soon.

Thank you all for your support and keep browsing.

Seascape - A demo work created during Soft pastel art workshop

"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary." Pablo Picasso

I conduct art workshops from time to time. It is my way of meeting art enthusiasts who share a passion for art just like me. During these art workshops I get to give live demo's of my techniques that I use to create landscapes, seascapes and other subjects as requested by the participants.

The soft pastel painting as below is a quick demo work of a seascape created during a recent two days soft pastel workshop for a participant who wanted to understand the steps involved in creating sky, some bushes, grasses and sea. So we decided to work on a morning scene at the beach, bright and breezy with white sandy seashore.

Seashore ( Demo work created during art workshop)

Soft pastel painting on Canson paper

Size 6" X 8"

My next Soft pastel workshop is coming up on 17th and 18th of September. The pastel brands that the participants get to use during the workshop are Mungyo, Gallery, Camlin and Koh-I-Noor. Camlin is pretty reasonable to start with but I normally recommend the soft pastel set of Koh-I-Noor which has 48 different bright colours. 

Unlike water colours and acrylics, colour mixing is not easy in soft pastels. Mixing more than two shades leads to muddy effect. Hence it is advisable to have different individual shades. I started with a single set of Mungyo ( 48 colours ) and then over a period of time went on to collect many different brands. While working it gets difficult to open up all the different boxes and that's the reason why I went on to create a small soft pastel palette which has all different brands mixed together. 

Soft Pastel Palette

I posted about "Organising my soft pastel palette" some time back and also wrote a post on how I go about "Cleaning my pastels" when it gathers dust on its side.

Study sketches using willow charcoal and charcoal powder

Creating small study sketches using charcoal medium

My "Two days charcoal workshop" is coming up this weekend and therefore I decided to do a few study works in charcoal medium. The last time I created a few of them I felt the need to introduce the very dark black tone, which is not easily possible with willow charcoal and charcoal pencil. Therefore in my present sketches I have combined both the willow charcoal and black charcoal powder to get the desired effect. ( Easily available in most of the stationery stores ).

All the sketches below have been created on ordinary white cartridge sheet. These sketches are a bit of speedy works done in a very loose manner. The sole aim of doing these kind of sketches is to get an understanding of new techniques that can be applied in future for improvising on the art work. This time I decided to add a waterfall scene too along with some forest scenes. All the images below are from places that I have visited in the past. 

A scene from Karnala Bird Sanctuary

A tourist point at Mahableshwar

The Abbey waterfalls

I am posting the image of the small bottle which contains charcoal powder in it. I purchased it from ART STATION, a stationery shop close to my residence. The powder is fairly good and I use a piece of old cloth as blender to apply it on the paper. 

Charcoal powder ( Used for creating charcoal sketches )

Quotations by artists inspire me a lot to continue my journey of art. When I come across an interesting one I post it on my blog. The one below is from MAKING A MARK, an interesting art blog.

"I desperately needed something to hold on to, so I held onto my pencil." Joann Sfar

Creating and storing Thumbnail sketches

"Good drawing forms the 'bones' on which a strong painting hangs." Chris Bingle

My blogging has taken a backseat. I am busy creating several thumbnail sketches or studyworks

so that I can start a fresh series of "ARTWORKS". Posting individual sketch can be a tedious task.

Therefore I group some of them together after editing, which makes blogging more convenient.

As I mentioned in my previous post, only some of my study sketches get converted into serious

artwork. In the sketches below there are scenes from Iceland, Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary, Panchgani and Phi Phi Leh. 

Four out of six of these painting have appealed to me with respect to composition and colours so I may go ahead and paint them soon on black Canson Mi Teintes paper.

Thumbnail sketches or Study sketches of Landscapes

on Canson Mi Teintes paper

Size 3.5" X 4.5"

I have been painting for several years now and "Thumbnail sketches" was not part of my routine until the year 2014. Slowly and steadily as I worked my way up the ladder, I realised that spending

a few minutes at creating a preliminary sketch takes care of lot of issues and helps the

final art piece to reach its desired stage. In other words nine out of my ten works reach completion.

Storing thumbnail sketches was a big concern in the beginning. So I came up with the idea of

using my old "Photo Albums". It worked really well for me.

Old Photo Albums

for storing Thumbnail sketches.

After completing the sketch I normally lift the polythene sheet carefully and then slide the 

painting inside from the open side. As the sketch is created in soft pastels, there is always a 

chance of its getting smudged, however the smudging is negligible and it can be easily

corrected if required. 

I have posted below two images of some of my initial study works in 2014when I was deeply 

into landscape study. It is a pleasure at times to go through some of the past works. 

Old Photo Albums, now used for storing

my Thumbnail sketches created in

Soft pastel medium.

Thanks for visiting my blog and browsing through my works. Do leave a comment to let me know how you store your artworks?