I have always loved Tanjor painting, where the central character, or the focal point, is always cute and chubby. Glass painting needless to say is a very satisfying art form. The process involved is simple yet requires a lot of patience and memory. I first washed the glass with soap and water, and dried it smudge free. I drew the Ganesha from reference on tracing paper. At this point I feel like mentioning that many of the Tanjor paintings are made from tracing a few well known drawings. Some of them are not done by artists who have given a thought to anatomy. It sometimes helps not to trace the original, but redraw it and bring in corrections. I then stuck the drawing with the drawn side facing me, with the help of simple tape. Then I started painting from the other side on the glass, so that the image I was painting was a laterally opposite paining, like a glass image. To paint in glass means to start with the details first, and then fill in the not so detailed works. I usually paint from up to down so that I don’t end up with paint or smudge marks, and keep a spare paper under my hand to avoid the same. After the outline and the ornamental details, I used a bit of liquid led in places I wanted to fill in stained glass paint to give it a jeweled effect. That was a bit tough, till my hand got used to it. It helps to start off with insignificant bits, and come to the face once you get the hand of it. The rest is just step by step painting. You fill in the stained glass paint, allow it to dry, paint the gold ornaments, then the garland and flowers and small details, then get to painting the flesh and its tones. The only tyring part was waiting. Since I juggle time between kid, home , blog and this, I wished the painting would dry up to my schedule rather than take its time. Oil paint takes sometimes a week to dry.
