Another try at art - Peacock feather

Since my maternity leave started, I have been wanting to do some art work. Also the upstairs bedroom really needed some kind of color in it. I searched around quite a bit on net, and finally found something that I could try out. I am not this great artist or anything, so I can only confidently try out simpler stuff which does not require too much of art work. Finally i saw this

http://diyshowoff.com/2012/03/25/diy-project-parade-peacock-feather-triptych-canvases/

So seeing this i thought this was achievable and when I told Sree, he was all for it.

So instead of Vinyl, I was able to find self adhesive kitchen contact paper in the garage. So I used that to draw the peacock feather.

We went to michaels and got yellow, blue and purple acrylic paints. We also got an extraction knife.

I practiced drawing a peacock feather few times, and then drew it on to the back side of the contact sheet. The next day, me and sree sat and cut it out using a extraction knife.

Once the stencil was cut, we cut the right pieces and stuck it onto the canvas. Once those were stuck, we sat and painted each canvas with the respective color. We got cadmium yellow, purple and crimson blue. Here is the snap of the final product, and we did multiple coats of paint for a more finished look.
Sree helped me paint multiple coats and it was fun to see him enjoying this.
Super excited about the final product.! We placed it in the upstairs guest room where my parents were going to stay.

Halloween!

Today is Taru's first Halloween. Since she is too small to go for trick or treat, we just decided to celebrate it by making a halloween costume for her. I went to target to check for costumes and did not find anything for her size, and also when i checked online, the prices are crazy. So since it is just for a day, and we can never use it again, i decided to make a small design on one of her onesies.

Here is what I did

For the doc - thank you!

My post partum visit to the doctor was scheduled after 6 weeks of delivering my little girl. Dr Menon is a great person and she was a big support and was awesome in the delivery room! I wanted to thank her and hence drew the below pic for her.

Thank you Dr Menon!

The new Malayalam movies, vineeth,Fahad and the rest

I was inspired to come back to my blog and pen down my thoughts immediately because I read Vineeth Srinivasan's blog and in one of his posts he had mentioned that its better to capture when your mind wanders. Many a time I feel about something very deeply, but due to my sheer laziness I keep postponing my writing.  I also have a daily journal, which has now become a few times in a month( I have an iPad, an iPhone and a laptop, but no technology can overcome laziness)

I do have a quite a bit of free time over weekends now and hence was browsing through latest Malayalam movies. With chappa-kurishu and 22 female kottayam, salt and pepper which I had seen earlier in the year, I had started to notice a trend in malayalam movies where quality and realism/good entertainment with new subjects were coming about. I welcomed this, because I had started to feel a little disconnected with the formula films, because they just go over the same subjects again and again.

Malayalam cinema was at this heights in the 80's and early 90's where good movies of Mohanlal, Jayaram, Mammutty etc came about. If you see those movies like Sanmassulavarku Samadhanam, mazhavil kavadi they have such good acting, story, humor and the directors and actors gave a lot of importance to sticking to the story line. I remember the days when my dad, mom and myself used to sit and watch the movies repeatedly. This was esp me and my dad and we were fans of Mohanlal and Jayaram movies because of the humor in them.

Malayalam movies were known for their strong subjects then. But somewhere down the line, we lost the rhythm and many formula movies started to come about and this i believe is mostly connected with satellite value or so. The audience too accepted a few of these, but many started to come in the same pattern where it lost its appeal. There were few years between 2000 and 2005 or 2006, where we could count the number of good movies. Movies ran, but audiences like me started to lose hope. I was not able to relate to many of the masala movies and stopped following many of the movies that got released.

Since I moved to US, I don't even know which are the new movies that gets released in Malayalam. And recently a few friends happened to mention a few good movies and I started watching Malayalam movies again. Among the few I watched was 22FK, Chappa Kurishu, Traffic etc. I felt really proud that malayalam industry is slowly getting penetrated with this set of youngsters like Vineeth Srinivasan, Fahad Fazil, Ashique Abu who knows what they want to make out of a story or cinema. This group do not believe in doing movies for the sake of doing. They value the script. They are not scared to explore unexplored story lines and they also cast the right people in the script. And moreover, the most amusing thing about these people are, they are all sons of established directors or actors, but the humility that they portray when they speak, their body language during interviews, makes us feel like they are just one of us. They don't have airs or egos, but the way they speak, the stuff they think of, the passion towards what they do speaks volumes about how talented these young people are.

This is actually a very pleasant change to malayalam cinema I feel. The storyline is getting much more realistic and entertaining and slowly I have started taking an interest in catching up on malayalam movies again. I feel we are slowly headed back to where it was in the 80's and early 90's and hopefully we would see great stories and subjects being explored in Mollywood again.