Bead Art - A study in patience!

Aaina's cousins in the US introduced her to bead art and sent her a jar of Perlar beads to play with. Aaina has taken this activity to a higher level of art and in the process taught the whole family valuable lessons in patience and perseverance.



Her equipment is a big jar of multicolored beads and some plates such as these. She uses the plates as a base to put in the beads in their places carefully. After the design is all assembled, one of us has to iron the plate with the beads covering the beads with an ironing paper that comes with the set. The heat fuses the beads together and holds it one unit and you can slip it out of the plate. ( i am not getting into the numerous times we have had a howling session when the ironing is not proper and the design fails to lift in one piece from the base plate ! - always reminds me of the time when my mom used to invert the baking-dish and we used to stand around and pray that the cake would come out as one whole piece lest we face a bad-tempered mom for the rest of the day!)

The time she decides and launches a new design, she requires the services of as many people as she can manage to sort out the beads and conveniently hand them over to her! she is extremely choosy about the exact colours. "NOT the light blue beads, i need the light blue-greenish transparent beads!" And then quiet descends, as the adults almost meditate while sorting the beads and she is busy focusing on the design. I must admit sorting and collecting the right colour beads is an almost therapeutic, peace-giving activity! Try its sometime.

Some of the designs she has copied from the suggestion booklet that comes with the set and some ( such as the rainbow)are her own creations.






This one design of the house below would take something like 3 man-hours(2 hours of an adult and 2 hours of a child-hour) of focussed work to finish.




Imagine how much time for all these!

The Comedy Cat Comic Book

This is Aaina's attempt at creating an indigenous comic strip made on - of all the things a shoe-box cover.
Her accompanying explanation is - This cat's 5th birthday is actually over, but her owner has forgotten and is showing his cat to someone and saying she is a "5 year old cat". The cat corrects him and laughs at him!

It has the Title and the credits on one side of the cover and the actual strip on the other side.

Just doodling!

This is a collection of her scribblings in her rough notebooks,scrap bits of paper which she doesnt really like to show to one and all ( in case she has made mistakes in spellings and such like).





On one sleepy sunday morning, Aaina got up very early morning and sat all by herself and an early morning inspiration to draw this portrait. By the time i got up, she had placed it by my pillow and said - here you go, this I have drawn this using only "warm colours" ( !! when and where did she learn that from?)

School Work - June 2007 - Theme - My Family

At Aaina's school they have a nice concept of having a theme for the month and all that they learn in different subjects revolves around the same theme.
The theme for the month in June was "my family". The Indian people in my Famile is an offshoot of this learning.
Here is a sample of her work during this month.


She though up of these wishes over one full weekend. She had many wishes and shortlisted these three.The second wish is a "Chocolate plant"




She insisted that her dog - Dexter who she is very fond of could not go missing! So we put in a dog but he has an identity crisis. Dexter is not a dalmatian but a Labrador.



Her teacher loved her work and showed it to the whole class according to Aaina.



She made many calls and refused to fill in details without checking with the individuals themselves. Her grandmother Manju said her favourite food was Bar-be-cued Chicken and aaina was almost in tears and went - oh Naani can you please change your favourite food? this wont fit in my box! so we compromised and wrote just "chicken"
Because she is an only child, we didnt have anything to fill in the last column. Megha, Varsha, Roshan, Nisha, Viraj and Raunaq are all her first cousins ( just in case it is concluded that the parents have been pretty busy!)

Salt Art

On a saturday afternoon while i returned from office early due to a severe bout of sore-throat and raging fever, i got an excited call from Aaina who explained the process of Salt art to me. It went in a highly excited tone of how we must first paint "whateverrrrr we want" and then sprinkle "lots of salt" on it and once dry, we must shake off the salt.And, she went on to say i have found one full plain sheet so come home soon and we can both do this - arent you excited ???!
My head swooned with thoughts of all that salt and the accompanying excitement but it surely put a smile on my face and i stopped to buy some thick drawing sheets for her to make up for my lack of enthusiasm.
This is what she came up with...



The waves are made as per her original process description. By the time she got to the Whale she ran out of patience and mixed the salt with the paint!
Needless to mention, we kept finding grains of salt under our feet all over the house!

Indian people in my famile(y)!

This is one of her imagination projections.Though everyone in her close and extended family is very much 100% indian, they do live abroad :). She has chosen to depict only the people who live in India. She has disqualified my brother's family as they "used to live in Chicago" once upon a time.
She is in the middle in the big heart. Her maternal grandparents - Nana and Nani are on either side and so are her parents - Arun and moi - Loveleen. She has cleverly put her paternal grandmommy - Ajji all by herself on the top as she has never met her grandfather who passed away before she was born.

About Aaina

Aaina is a 6 and a half year old little girl who lives in Bangalore. She loves to draw and paint with a passion which needs to be seen to be believed. As her mother, i have no high and unreal convictions of her being an extraordinary artist or having some super hidden talent...but yes, i admire her passion and her zeal for any kind of art. Like other kids she loves to watch art-attack and M.A.D and itches to try her hand at every idea that they demonstrate. She has an amazing knack of putting her arbitrary thoughts into pictures, sketches and paintings.
This blog is meant to record her everyday work which may be lost to us as many times she just draws on white boards and rubs it off. some of her work she loves to preserve but then is careless on where she has put it and loses it.