Urban Warli - An Easter Special!

My love of art and trying something different always has me exploring new territories of artistic expression and this is one such experiment.

I have been working with Warli for a little while now and I absolutely enjoy it for its simplistic elegance. Warli is an Indian tribal art, which illustrates daily rituals and social events of the Warli tribe. We will certainly go through more details about this interesting art form in a future post, but in this one I want to share with you my attempt towards adding an urban attitude to Warli! For this particular art piece I decided to go against conventional depiction of tribal seasons or rituals, like harvest or hunting and instead to look at a typical city event and protray it.

Easter is coming up this weekend and there are several Easter activities that have kept everyone busy in the city this week, whether it is the egg hunts, Easter crafts or planning parties. Since this is the big celebration for the week, I decided to illustrate the Easter Egg Hunt through Warli. I have taken a textured pastel coloured cardstock paper (A4 size) and folded it vertically to form the basic A5 size card. I have trimmed this card to fit a standard A5 size picture frame. Sometimes if a card is well made people like to frame it, so size the card in a way that it fits standard frame sizes.

I have used a black Sharpie to draw the elements on this one since I was using a textured paper. If it were a smooth paper I would have used acrylic colours and a size '0' brush. On the card I have tried to show a local park with the children and parents enjoying the Easter egg hunt along with some Easter bunnies, a food and refreshment table and a picnic feel. I have tried to keep to an contemporary essence by including the parked cars outside the park, a home across the park, people walking their dogs and so on.

I’m glad with the outcome of my first mix and match experiment and I am planning to continue working on more contemporary designs. Do send me suggestions for  they are more than welcome and so are your feedbacks on this one!

- Shamoni

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