I have begun to paint. Well, this includes drawing, sketching, and using a wide selection of available mediums. If completing nearly 30 A4 watercolour sheets in a few months appears fine, then I am going on fine.

For decades I have been fascinated with buying colours. Watercolours. Pastels. Blendable pencils. Watercolour pencils. Graphite pencils. Stencils. Acrylic colours. Oil paints. Watercolour paper pads and diaries. Crayons. Brushes. Brush pens. But don’t think I am just a hoarder of paints. A few pencil sketches, a few artworks where I used poster colours and watercolours, two canvases in oil, and… well, quite a few caricatures and funny illustrations done digitally. In fact, most of my posts on my blog included digitally drawn artworks. I have also done a couple of covers for ‘Education Post’ that was editing until a few years back.

And yet I had to constantly hear: ‘No more entering art shops. No more buying stuff that you really do not need.’

But the past year has changed it all.

I have finally done some deep dives into mediums like watercolours, oil pastels, chalk paints, and Intense ink pencils and I must admit that I am exhilarated. Encouraged. Feeling uplifted. Even Pushkin and Monika said: ‘Here is a selection of your artworks that we’d love for our home in London.’ Sounds super, I said… as this makes me intensely happy. Pleased. Chuffed. Almost like an writer whose manuscript has been accepted by a publisher.

I now know that though attending a few online sessions did help me get closer to wanting to paint, what really mattered was tearing away from mundane daily tasks that pretend to be far more important than they really are. The will to sit for hours trying to find a better way was like a magical spell and I never wanted to get out of it. Let me tell you about how I found rubbing and trying to blend oil pastels rather slipshod until I watched some randomly selected video on YouTube that asked me to try out rubbing alcohol to create a stable base. I tried and succeeded in getting the effect that I wanted. Victory!

Now that we are talking about YouTube, let me add that I have watched tens of artists sharing their tips and most of these like the one where you spread water in a defined area and then simply touch your paint-loaded brush. The colour spreads in a gentle gradient and I painted a set of flowers in black!

Ideas. How did I get ideas to link to the different painting mediums that I have tried? My visits to art galleries like Tate Modern and Saatchi in London, modern art galleries Delhi, Paris, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and hundreds of other cities all over the world has helped. Quite a lot of credit also goes to Instagram. There are thousands of artworks that the art community has shared and there are hundreds who simply copy those. No, I try to stay away from copying… but I am not averse to looking at an artwork and then blending it with my interpretation to create something entirely different using a medium of my choice. Yes, I have even picked little gems from several artworks to bring them all together in a cohesion that just happened. Does this mean that my art isn’t my art? That the stuff that I do is never to be defined as original? I disagree… my artworks are definitely original though parts may look uncannily like another artwork that someone may have seen elsewhere.

However, having your own signature style is something entirely different. All the artworks that I have done so far do not represent my style. I am still journeying through the world of art, trying to reach a stage where I create a style of painting that I want to do again and again. This is what people do when they enter the world of writing. I once tried to give my writing a Wodehouse-like humour and in the years to follow tried to be like Dickens, Hemingway, and a few others. The same was when I wrote poems and anyone with a discerning eye might be able to detect Dickinson, Vikram Seth, Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, and numerous other poets. This makes another facet of creativity amply clear. Writers must read extensively, just as artists must visit galleries both online as well as offline. Artists and those who wish to create art must first fall in love with reading about art, observing artworks, and listening to what artists have to say about their work. Strangely, despite all this, what ultimately emerges a winner is the will to sit down and draw or paint or sketch… or alternate between all of of them until you know what you would love to do again and again.
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Arvind Passey
Written on 27 February 2025