Zainab's Art Adventures

A couple of months ago I attended a two-week summer program at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture  in Karachi. The program was titled Crossover , and was aimed at students aged 15 and above. (My sister Fatima , who also attended these two courses alongside me and my brother , wrote a descriptive piece about the whole experience which you can check out here .) One of the assignments in the second week of the course - which was titled Media Crossings , and covered themes connected to social media, filmmaking and new media/post-internet art among others - was this thing which I am posting here. The task was to think about ourselves and our identities; both online as well as in real life, and then to create an art piece that acts as a portal between the two.  Although I don't think the piece I created does that very well (I think what I did made the contrast more obvious instead of bridging the difference), here's the result anyway. The face ...

Different Same , by Zainab Salman For several years, I have always been double-minded about using ink for anything . I write solely with fineliners, and never fountain pens, and use ink only when I feel a sudden urge to experiment with calligraphy or something that can only be carried out with ink. This is largely because of all my unpleasant experiences with ink, most of which end up with a wonderful piece of work ruined with blotches of ink all over. I have never known a medium that can be messier than ink. However, for this piece, I felt like I wanted to use ink. And gladly, the results were much better than my expectations. :D For this painting I used a compass (for the circle patterns), a grey fineliner, green ink and a reed pen.  The name of the painting, Different Same , has a lot to do with the meaning behind it. If you look closely, there is a lot of repetition in the design - all the shapes, although each slightly different in design and size, are essential...

This is a painting I made digitally. This is one of the first good pieces of digital art I've made in a long time. Although I'm reasonably good at graphic designing and I'm not that bad at drawing traditionally either, I really do suck at digital art. Anyway, this is one of the not-so-bad ones, something I made fairly recently. I honestly don't have much to say about this. I'm sure this has some sort of 'meaning' behind it but I'm not sure what exactly. So I'm going to leave it to you to work out what it means, do let me know in the comments. xD Untitled digital painting

One of the things I   enjoy doing most is typography/ hand-lettering. It is something that I'm doing very often, and most of the time, I'm doing it instinctively. Luckily, I don't even need any fancy materials for it. Most of the time; I simply use these black pointers by a local company but once I also got a Staedtlar Triplus Fineliner  (and hey, these are not   affiliate links! ;D) and that lasted longer. Anyhow, here are some quotes I read somewhere and really liked, so I typograph-ed them. (I know typography is a noun but because I do it so much, I really think it should be a verb as well as a noun. :D). This quote by Cyril Connolly is one of my all-time favorites. It currently hangs in our study space, to remind us something very important. :) "Better to write for ourselves and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." -Cyril Connolly (click on this for a closer look) I made this one with brown and white acrylic paints on c...

I am so sorry for not being able to post in October until yet! Anyways, here is a painting I made around late September; make-up on canvas once again. sorry for the bad quality :/  There was something wrong with our DSLR's memory cards so I had to take this picture with my mother's phone I made this one on a 10" by 10" inches canvas. Although I intended to make something entirely with lip-gloss initially, I did not have enough of it and the it was too dull  so I was compelled to use lipstick( I hate everything dull ). Later on I used some eye-shadow for the clouds and too make the buildings look shiny. I did not have any plan for this beforehand, nor did I make any initial sketches; I just pulled off the plastic covering from the canvas and got to work. I thought I would make something abstract but that didn't just happen. I made a few lipstick strokes and then decided that it was a building, then made more buildings. This is called ' Illusion' b...

I made this Canvas painting during Ramadan with acrylics. The canvas was perhaps the largest ever I painted-the size was beautiful-a long 12'' by 36'' inches(1 by 3 feet) and I had a great time painting this. The only two colors I used were white and aquamarine blue. The results are satisfactory, I suppose. Now the painting is leaning against the table where my laptop sits, waiting to be framed. :D I am sorry for the bad photography :/

I did this water colour painting back in March.

I did this panting a few days ago.I didn't mean to paint this, I planned to write the quote"Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence"(Vince Lombardi). I had only painted the background and written the word 'Perfection' on it with grey when I decided that it looked awful, and so I scratched it away with the back of my paintbrush. This scratched patch of grey paint became the first building in the painting.  I added a few cars and more buildings, scratching away doors and windows. I decided that the sun should not be grey like the buildings, because buildings are made by man, and the sun is not, so I painted the sun white. I think white is a color that portrays purity-compared to grey-and so the painting shows a contrast between things created by man and things created by God. Also,the white sun creates an impression of extreme heat-which is caused by global warming; a result of the increasing urbanization. City Life: ...

Watercolour on paper

This is a Monet-style Painting that I just made. And like one of Claude Monet's paintings, I named it Nature:Impression, after his painting, Sunrise:Impression. Here's the Painting!

Here are two pictures of trees that I painted recently(well, maybe not so recent). I painted another too, but these two are the best.

Here's a scanning of a picture I made by drawing flowers with wax crayons on a sheet of paper. Then I made blue and green watery paint and sponged the blue paint above the flowers(for the sky) and green paint on the flowers. Here's what it looks like!