Sunday, October 26, 2014

A Diwali to celebrate...


A few days ago was Diwali, the festival of lights. 
This year, my celebratory card was inspired by a project I am working on that was a result of a wonderful workshop at 

The workshop La lectura del Ilustrador (The Illustrator's Reading) invited it's participants to read traditional tales 
and work at appropriating them by creating a personalized reading through images.

We read lots and lots...
Grimm, Anderson, Bashevis Singer,Perrault, among others.
After which each one of us chose a tale to work with.
I chose Rudyard Kipling's The Elephant Child: an endearing story about a small elephant whose insatiable curiosity leads him to
very unexpected travels and encounters.

We made lots of work too: 
from Ex-libris, to illustrated initials, 
and Chinese shadow puppets. My Chinese shadow puppets of the characters appear in my previous post.
Here are some images of my ex-libris and some sketches. 



And gradually began adapting our images to our own personal 
interpretations of the stories. 




In the last phase of the workshop each one of us was assigned a traditional story-telling object to create with our chosen story.
Mine was the portable storytelling shrine or temple from Northern India called the Kavaad.

Until a couple weeks ago, I had never seen an actual Kavaad, but then visiting Akhyan an exhibition of Indian Masks, I was thrilled to find two of them. And spent quite a lot of time sketching them, and figuring out the intricate system of doors and flaps and how I would eventually have to construct my own.
  

Kavaad from Akhyan exhibition in Madrid 

Zoom of the Kavaad's inner door revealing the sacred shrine
My notes & sketches of the Kavaad

Sketches of the visual structure of the story

 
I have yet to start building the actual object, 
but decided to begin a drawn structure a part of the kavaad as my
diwali greeting for this year.

The inner shrine reveals a fully grown Elephant's Child in the embodiment of a Ganesha-like god. 


artwork for the greeting





Wishing you all a very colorful and light-filled Diwali!
Will post updates on this project soon.

Diwali goody bags
Rangoli (colored decorations)
Diwali pooja (ritual)






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