Start to Finish...

Good evening!

The Cox & Kings 'Inspiring India' bloggers challenge concluded last night with a wonderful evening at the Royal Geographical Society. There was an engaging talk from Sir Mark Tully, beautiful authentic music and lots of lovely food floating about! And of course, lots of artwork on display and open to votes! I hear that the event was also mentioned in the Telegraph newspaper on the 6th, so if anyone has a copy I would love to see! I began work on my piece with a strong design in mind, even down to the colour palette I wanted to use. I started by sketching out the main character (I rarely work without characters it seems!) of an Elephant in pencil. This was followed by some Peacock feathers...

Everything was then painted with acrylic and scanned in! The background was painted separately with a large brush to get the sweep of colour that I was hoping for, as I wanted to keep as much of the original paint texture as possible.

I also drew my own Indian inspired henna patterns which were converted to a beautiful brick red colour and applied very lightly to the background layer to add another point of interest. I'm not sure whether they are prominent enough, but I really liked them anyway! I also added a subtle image of the beautiiful Taj Mahal; it was kept consciously simple because I did not want it to steal focus.

And at the end, I finished up with this!

In between offering escorted tours and luxury holidays, the fabulous Cox & Kings had compiled a great little leaflet so that the guests could cast their votes on the night-

It was wonderful to see all of the fabulous artwork on display, and had been curated wonderfully in order to emphasise the diversity of imagery. So a huge congratulations to Cox & Kings for putting this on, and a big thanks for asking me to be involved. Here is my piece on the easel (photograph courtesy of Che Kumar)

And finally, I am proud as punch to be able to show you the winning image, again produced by my hugely talented friend, Che of cheism.com!

Isn't it gorgeous?! Well done, Che! Well, I have bombarded you with plenty of images for one day, so do check back soon for the next set of the Dolls' House Magazine's murder mystery images!

TTFN
xx