Gaurav Verma's Blog

Making of ‘Antithesis’ painting

Some of my friends have already seen my unique style (as far as I am aware of), where I use lines to draw a complex shape. See following picture (By the way, this was just something I draw on whiteboard with a marker while in a meeting):

So when I was presented the idea of including this pattern in a painting, I was not sure how it will look. But then again, thought whats the harm in trying. We thought many ideas, some involving brain others involving trees etc. But ultimately idea that we decided was having a yin-yang painted and on top of yin-yang these complex patterns will be there.

To validate the idea, we draw the concept on a chart paper and it certainly was looking very good. Now main issue that we had to solve was how to draw these complex pattern

so that it looks good on painting. Obvious one was that we can paint the lines in different colors, but that seemed very simple approach and we was looking for some nice experiment. First idea that came to mind was to use threads, dark color threads for one half on yin-yang and bright colors for other. We brought some threads and paste it on top of patterns but soon realized that this will not fly. It will take lot of effort in dying threads of different colors and then sticking it to the canvas. Also, texture was not looking good. Next obvious choice was wool, and man, was that looking beautiful. Final decision was that we would use wool for giving texture to the painting.

Next step was to create yin-yang and we did that without much hassle and painted one half with yellow (half with bright colors on top) and other half with gray (half with dark colors).

Next came the most important part. Sticking wool on canvas and in process creating a complex yet simple looking pattern. We started with a small part and this was the end result,

For pasting wool to canvas, we mixed water with fevicol and used that mixture. But that seemed like a daunting task, covering whole yin-yang with wool but we were sure that once done it will look amazing. 

And then started the process of ‘wooling’, initially it was very difficult but with practice things got easy.

I had already drawn lines by using a pencil on canvas as guideline on where to stick wool, and whole team worked with dedication and passion. It was manual and tiring task but everybody was contributing some time and slowly slowly painting was filling up,

and final touches were the background. We took a picture of painting and used photoshop to figure out which radial gradient will look best and decided that radial gradient going from white to dark blue will look best. It took more than three coating of acrylic paint to get the desired effect.

And, with some more filling and final touches, here is the final painting on display.

This painting would not have been completed without passion, dedication and hard work of Swati, Piyush, Sonalika, Sumit, Madhusmita, Nadia. Thanks team, we really created something worth praising. I had a great time doing this. Thank you again.