After India

My head is buzzing with what I've seen and done and it's hard to know where to begin.  Out of my hundreds of photos however can I distill my experience?

There were wonderful moments of calm that I will never, ever forget  

The wonderful Taj Mahal made me cry

Breakfast in the Himalayan foothills

and the noise and confusion that is city life.

Everyone and everything

I need to find a starting point so I've used a photo as the basis for some sketchbook work.

I was following this group of laughing, happy, sari clad girls and I couldn't resist taking a photo of the vibrant colours.

I snipped out the colours

Pixilated the image using Paint.net

then used the Dents effect

The result is clearly identifiable but abstracted in a lovely way.

I played with the proportions until I had an A4 image and printed it out 3 times.  It then hit my sketchbook:

I used two images as my background and slashed the third into jagged pieces and stuck them randomly on the base.  It's a far cry from happy girls in pretty saris.  I've called it "Fragmented, Frenzied,  India" because it just captures the noise, disorganisation and chaos.

I'm not sure why these images look different in quality; the second is much sharper but I made no changes to the scanning properties (that I know of).

I used my camera as a sketchbook so many of my photos concentrate on shape, pattern, colour and so on.  I like these two images because they are similar but oh so different.

Lampshade made from glass beads

Single use clay cups

It's going to take months for this journey to shake down but it promises lots of interesting work that hopefully will have some merit.