Chalk it out

After this warm up,the workshop begins in its practical sense. Yadav gives us a demo on the the right way of holding the chalk and we all follow. The participants are asked to choose an object from the room and make a sketch of it on one of the blank sheets. Once perfected,we move to the fabriano paper. By Yadav’s instructions,we hold the chalk at the tip and use the middle and the ring finger to smudge the strokes and blend the colour tones.

It is surprising how a little tilt of the chalk can make a difference to the stroke on the paper. The roughness of the fabriano paper complements the chalk dust in the process of this art. The friction holds on to the chalk dust,it also makes blending easier and gives a range of tones to the painting. Once the outline and the basic details are finished,we colour in the picture,very delicately. Well,the technique is quite simple actually. One needs to use small concentrated strokes on targeted areas and then fill the surrounding space by smudging the stroke with their fingers. Experimentation with various tones and textures is possible by smudging the dust of different coloured strokes. If you don’t like the hue of a particular part of your painting,you can always load another stroke of colour and smudge it all over again for a whole new effect.

That painting with chalk will be a less messy affair compared to water colours or oil paint,was our assumption. It was proven wrong at the workshop. We noticed that even though there was no liquid base like water or oil was involved,all of us were covered in chalk dust by the time the paintings were done. Little surprise considering we used our fingers as a brush,smudge tool and even as an eraser.