Good Afternoon!! I hope that you are all well. As promised, this week I will be sharing with you all the new piece that I started inspired by the Bhagavad Gita and one of my favorite artists, Bijay Biswaal. Strap in!
For those of you who are not aware, the Bhagavad Gita has been colloquially termed as the “Hindu Bible.” It is one of the holy scriptures of Hinduism containing 700 verses dictating a conversation between the deity Krishna and the soldier Arjuna. The Bhagavad Gita does not talk about religion at all, it speaks on the values necessary to lead a good life, how to be a good person, and the answers to daily struggles. It is said that if you were having any problem, open to a random page of the Bhagavad Gita and you will gain some wisdom!
As such an important part of my culture, I decided that I wanted to create my next big piece based off of the famous cover of the Bhagavad Gita. The most common picture that you would see if you were to buy the book is shown to the left. Interestingly, the cover is factually incorrect! There are supposed to be 5 white horses, not 4!
The chariot represents the human body. The five white horses are the five senses—tasting, seeing, hearing, smelling and touching. The chariot’s reins, which the charioteer uses to drive his vehicle, symbolize the human mind. Finally, the driver represents human intelligence while the passenger symbolizes a person’s spirit or soul. The first time I heard this I thought that it was such beautiful symbolism. It gives one full autonomy to control our sense, giving way for our soul to go down the correct path.
I am so excited with my progress on this piece. I decided to recreate the cover of the Bhagavad Gita according to scripture, making sure there were 5 horses instead of 4. Additionally, I wanted to stylize the piece more and took inspiration from some works by Bijay Biswaal, who’s work I am very fond of and have recreated once before (check it out here!)
I am doing this piece, untitled currently, on a 40″x50″ canvas with oil paint. The underpainting was done with acrylic and was painted over an old existing painting. I still have a long way to go and many many details to sculp. I look forward to keeping you all updated!
As always, if any questions or thoughts arise, please comment or reach out to me!
Lately, I’ve missed the freedom of having a sketchbook. I used to fill out at least a page every day in high school. I’d take the time to sketch in classes and then color when I got home using my fancy Copics. There was something freeing about it; there isn’t an undo button like there is when I draw digitally, so I’d be forced to exert confidence with each and every line. After a while, I started to care less and less about making a perfect drawing, moving in favor of filling out the page with as many sketches and ideas as I possibly could. It brought me solace.
Now, though I have a physical sketchbook, it doesn’t feel the same as high school. I left all my fancy pens and markers in my hometown, leaving me sketching with only a black BIC pen. It’s still just as fun, but I realized that I missed the clutter of colors scattered across pages. Something had to be done about this, I thought. I need the solace of a sketchbook again.
So, I’ve started to use my same old sketchbook methods but digitally, now – I cover a huge canvas in as many doodles as I can, finished or unfinished. Mind you, this is a very unconventional method for digital artists; usually, it’s good to fill out one canvas with one drawing to preserve a higher quality. But for me, it’s fun to watch one canvas build up art over time. Every drawing is small in perspective to the whole canvas, alleviating any pressure I feel about creating a “perfect” drawing. It’s like a time capsule, a way to look back at my state of mind as I draw through each week, and I didn’t realize how much I missed that simple feeling until I started again. Below, you can see two examples (there’s even some old OTMs on these, haha)!
They’re a little messy, a little disorganized, but there’s so much love in them, and that’s what makes me happy. It’s fun to just go crazy and draw to my heart’s content all on one page, rather than focus on what used to make me scared about art (a perfect portfolio piece, dozens of hours sunken into one piece, extreme detail and technical skill). If you’re an artist and stuff like that’s been giving you some extra stress, maybe it would be fun to wind down with a massive sketch canvas, too! Have a great week!
This week I wanted to talk a bit about my process and how I create a lot of my more complex digital drawings. I originally studied Illustration at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. During my time there, I spent a lot of time learning anatomy and perspective. In the illustration program, almost all of my work had to be on paper, they teach traditional art for the most part in that department.
With this, I usually start out my drawings on paper, and then take a photo of them. I then upload the image to procreate on my Ipad, where I color in the image. Sometimes I will include line work, but I really just love using value in my digital artwork. I like to think of it more as a digital painting than anything. It is a lot easier to digitally paint in the colors in my opinion. Then I am able to get exactly the right tones that I want, and if I mess up there is always the undo button.
I know this isn’t a good tutorial on digital drawing, but it is just my different way of going about most of my more complex artwork.
In Greek mythology, Hercules was given 12 labors he needed to complete to atone for the murder of his wife and children. These 12 labors involved doing the impossible: defeating hydras, taking an Amazon’s belt, and picking the Hesperides’ golden apples. While we might not have to deal with gods, myths, and monsters in our everyday life-we do have our own herculean tasks to manage. The hardest of them all is maintaining focus.
I have tried mindfulness in my own life and there is something wholly impossible about focusing on something in a world full of distractions. We are always plugged into something whether that be the music in our ears or a movie running in the background. We are not at a loss for stimulus, we are burdened by it. Facing such a burden means we are easily detached from where we are. We don’t stop to think about the beauty of the stars, or the focus on a stranger’s face.
Tola, a photographer, tries to challenge this way of living. Tola, like the rest of us, is busy and struggles to stop and smell the roses. For her, photography is a tool to employ mindfulness in her life. It forces her to pay attention to the moment and capture it. When taking a photograph, she needs to find out how to best capture the truth of her subject matter. This means she needs to consider angle, contrast, and color amongst many other things. It helps that she’s been doing this for such a long time.
Me: So what originally got you interested in photography?
Tola: It was my mom actually, she was a photographer.
Me: So it runs in the blood?
Tola: Kind of, when I was younger she would take me to her photography studio and let me play with her camera. She even let me play with photoshop. Back then, photoshop was like a big deal because you needed to pay a lot of money to license it. I would change people’s hair colors and just mess with them. We traveled a lot too, and she would take thousands of photos everywhere we went, and I just always remember her with a camera. Like her, I just automatically started taking photos everywhere I went.
Me: How were your early photos?
Tola: They were bad, but I mean with anything creative that’s how you develop right? I started doing it more professionally in high school and then pretty soon my friends would ask me to photograph different things for them.
Me: You became the designated friend group photographer.
Tola: *smiles* yeah, basically.
Tola, like most artists, started off taking photos of everything and is still in the process of figuring out her favorite subject matter. However, she does know one thing and that is she loves taking pictures of people in their most organic form. A lot of this stems from her interesting 10th-grade experience when she went to a traveling high school.
Me: Okay, so traveling high school? Please tell me more about it.
Tola: Yeah I get that a lot, people are confused by it. The whole concept is that you live in a country every couple of months and the entire school travels with you. That’s the students, the teachers, and the staff and they arrange accommodation and everything. We went to Peru, San Francisco, and Morocco.
Me: Where was your favorite?
Tola: Probably Peru, the people there were just amazing. *laughs* I mean, to them I was the outsider so they wanted photos with me and they’d let me take photos of them. It was just a very cool experience.
Me: That’s amazing.
Tola: It feels like a dream but then again it changed my life so much, so the experience itself was very real.
Inspired by the people she met while traveling, Tola likes capturing the essence of the human experience. She loves taking candids, looking for the moment when someone is completely caught up in conversation. These moments are rare and impossible to capture without luck and good timing. Moments of authenticity and connection. A smile caught half forming, a conversation between two friends or the brief prelude of autumn offered by early September. Through photography, Tola sees the value in these moments. She grounds herself in the present, in life itself.
“Starry Night” by Tola Killian
Me: So what does it mean to capture a moment?
Tola: Well, it’s hard because if you are telling people you are taking a photo, they’ll just pose for it. You can’t ask someone to pretend to do something, they need to be actually doing it. It has to be the right moment when they are so immersed in what they’re doing that they forget that I’m there. I really like those moments.
It’s about authenticity, it’s about being real in a world that seems so curated. Tola’s photography and the rest of her creative pursuits work to ground her in a busy fast moving world. A reminder that in a life as busy as this one, it’s important to stop and capture the moment- with or without a camera.
You can find more of Tola’s photography here at arts. ink:
Trust is pivotally important in relationships and in life. Cherish and protect it in yourself, and be cautious of others.
Trust your gut! If something feels not-quite-right, it probably isn’t.This is good advice. However, I’ve also heard the opposite. People show you who they are. Sometimes we choose to stay blind to what’s right in front of us.
