Under the second face of Skill Development workshop programme of the museum, the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya is organising special Skill development workshop on Mysore Painting from July 8 to 14.

In this workshop, the training on Mysore Painting of Karnataka provided by Daughter of renowned Mysore Painter, Ramanarasaiah and traditional Mysore Painter, Chandrika to the registered participants at Avritti Bhawan AC Hall and she told that Earlier to make a base for painting, artists used to paste 10-20 layers of newspaper, on that they paste the drawing sheet over which they apply the paste of refined flour (Maida). Nowadays, artists have changed the technique of using the base.

They use mount board, over which they paste ivory sheet or cartridge sheet and start the painting. The first step requires the artist to make a preliminary sketch of the image on the base. Thereafter, he makes a paste of zinc oxide and Arabic gum, known as 'gesso paste'. This paste is used to give a slightly raised effect of carving to those parts of the painting that require embellishments and is allowed to dry. The artist does two coatings of this paste to make a proper raised surface. Then, gold foil is pasted onto the surface, using Arabic gum.

Since it is gold foil, which is very expensive, they use the left out gold foil on some other surfaces of painting. The rest of the painting is prepared with the help of water colors. Initially they used natural dyes, which are replaced by synthetic poster colors and water colors in modern times.

Chandrika told that the basic colours that we can see in any Mysore painting are primary colours: Red, Green and Blue. Earlier the colours used were made out of natural resources and were very few like green, blue, yellow, red, black and white.