The Old Holy Basil Flower

The Old Holy Basil Flower by Sudipto Sarkar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

I reckon nobody would want to hear the back story of how an artist got back to his art, but here’s the summary: I got up really early today, couldn’t go back to sleep and had nothing else to do. Result, I started checking out some artists’ blogs. After three hours, I decided to go back to what I was once good at. Went to the market, picked up some water colors and brushes (figured out then that prices had touched sky). I spent another two hours working on getting a subject to paint. Finally, I settled for a portrait of Josh Radnor (I am big darn fan of How I met your mother). I was going for the photorealistic genre, but I guess you can’t really change your signature after years of developing your own. This was the first time in about four years. I hadn’t picked up a brush, let alone a pencil in four years. Of course, being a software engineer, I haven’t had much contact with writing with hand for a long time. Holding the pencil was tough enough (I prefer to sketch out the outline before beginning with the brushes). Fortunately, the portrait turned out just fine… I figured I’m not as regular with my painting to setup another blog for it. I’ll post it here when I get it scanned…

I also tried posting more regularly, but with work, it’s kinda hard to maintain the enthusiasm (has been happening every time I think I’m going to post more regularly, for the last three years)…

And now about this photograph, I took it during my Agartala trip. My parents’ neighbours had a holy basil tree on the roof and the flowers were quite brown (as opposed to violet)…