Friday, June 15, 2007

Fibreglass mural - finally complete !

4'X6' fibreglass mural
(click on the image to see a bigger version)

This started of as a terracotta mural 2 yrs back.......
completed as a fibreglass mural..... just yesterday!

Right after the 5 academic years in college, a bunch of us... Swetha, Manju and i started a mural for our freind SL... for his new house ! What we had done in terracotta looked great.. its quite time consuming and it takes days and days to dry. As we had started doing it right in the monsoon season.. it took about 2 months to dry. Finally gave it for baking and about 5 peices of the Terracotta mural maze had to break down while firing. This was our first terracotta mural and we amatuers must have let some air-bubbles seap in, which gave way to the cracks. Though we were aware of the possibility of breaking while firing.. we wanted to take our big chance and try it out. This was a great learning for all of us. By the time this dried and got fired, each one of us had moved into doing different things in our lives and we could not get back to finishing the mural. All thanks to our freind SL who waited patiently. I guess he had almost lost hope that we would ever complete his mural.... but we suddenly came back to the enthu spirit to finally complete it. This time it was Swetha, Nandini and i. Our dear freind Manju is busy getting prepared to step into a wedlock. We missed her as much as she missed working on this mural together. This time, we didnt want to take a chance with terracotta as it will shrink, take time to dry (its the monsoon season again) and still there is a big chance while firing it. So we decided to try our hands on doing it in Fiber. We need to specially thank Mr.Basu who guided us 2 yrs back when we were trying our hands with clay. Now a special thanks to Mr.Chalapathy (Swetha's dad who is a well renouned sculptor of Bangalore) and Rangaswamy who guided and helped us through the fibre process ! 10 days of work-work-work and today.. its finally complete!

I will soon put up the whole sequence and step-by-step procedure of the 'making' of this mural !
Its been a great learning and a great experience !! :)