Celebrating the freedom struggle through the creative efforts of budding artists
As part of its annual roster of skill development events, HT School recently organised a portraitmaking workshop titled ‘Junior Da Vinci’ on 29th April at the HT House, Delhi.
The session, conducted by Mohit Suneja, Illustrator, Hindustan Times, was attended by students of Classes IX-XII from schools across Delhi-NCR like Sanskriti School, Chanakyapuri, Mayoor School, Noida, GD Goenka School, Model Town and Delhi Public School, Vasundhara.
The theme of the workshop was Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav “75 years of Indian independence”. The workshop began with a small introduction to the Indian independence movement and the concept of portraits. Various methods and explanations of different drawing techniques were shared with students. They were provided with image references of a few freedom fighters such as Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad, Subhash Chandra Bose, Mahatma Gandhi, Mangal Pandey etc. which they had to drawn. The participants were also provided with art materials to paint with their choice of mediums. They were given a live demonstration of how to use the tracing paper effectively to create a lively portrait on the drawing sheet.
Within this 2-hour workshop, many students displayed their talent and executed remarkably beautiful and lively portraits of their favourite freedom fighters with various interesting drawing techniques by using pencil shading, watercolours, pencil colours etc.
During the workshop, the students freely interacted with Suneja. There was a free exchange of ideas and students were also individually guided. “Interacting with the students was such a delight
and they were more than happy to get their hands dirty and learn something new and exciting. They were keen to explore new areas and were intrigued by the nitty-gritties of the the process,” said Suneja.
“It was a learning experience to see the different techniques being used by other students.
The highlight of the workshop for me was how to make the eyes look more lively. I also realised that I need to improve my confidence,” said Shunyansh Thapa, student, class IX, Suncity School, Gurugram.
“I’m grateful for this experience where everyone was free to make art in the way they like and I really admire that. The trainer also educated us on the freedom fighter’s contributions while giving us details of the portrait making process,” said Charu Ratnoo, student, class XII, Sanskriti School.
The workshop delved into details of how to create a portrait with nuances. Some of the specific pointers that were shared by Suneja focused on making the portrait more realistic and almost human-like, making the eyes as captivating as possible, working with pencil shading and colours more efficiently to bring the images to life as well as highlighting the expressions and moods of the subject. He guided students on how to find one’s style and how to work with different rendering techniques creatively to bring the artist’s personal style to life.
The students who were very eager to learn and apply the techniques went home enthused and enthralled with their learning discoveries of the day.