An Ancient Art Adventure !

Hello everybody! This summer break, for the first time I was delving into the subject of history. I had decided to explore ancient India. Since I love art too, I decided to combine art and history and make my learning exciting. I found this amazing program that was teaching us young time travellers about art in ancient civilisations. It was a perfect match to my ancient India study. The program was held in the National Museum of Art, Delhi in collaboration with Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. The art sessions were named Craftopia.

It was a ten day program and we did various arts and crafts like making a pachisi, an ancient game, miniature paintings of the Mughals, Egyptian paintings, Relief Sculptures and much more.

On the first day we made a White Box which came from Gujrat and was made in the 20th century. We first listened to an exciting story which talked about barter system which happened when we did not have money to trade. So, people traded things with each other. The teachers told a fictional story about a monkey and the white box too. I was quite mesmerised by the appearance of the box and its design.

The white box is a beautiful box where you can store many things. The box is made out of Ivory, but we used a wooden box. We painted the box and made design's out of banana leaves which were processed into something we call cola leaves.

Here is the picture:

Me holding White box

The paper is cola leaf

The next day we talked about miniature paintings.

Miniature paintings are colorful handmade paintings, very small in size. Miniature paintings all started with the Mughal Emperors; they would sit in a royal way and let the painter make a small painting of them and make a bold border and put patterns around it. And then they would frame it in a frame made out of gold .

The masterpiece of the miniature paintings is this one-

 Dara Shikoh Sha Jha's Eldest son getting married

I created this version of my myself!

This was a relief sculpture from Ancient Egypt. We used carving tool sand ceramic clay to depict an old man from Egypt. This according to me is one of the best works I did because I added lots of details and it was quite challenging.

This piece was made with white clay and blue ink. It is a plate that I painted. The original designs were made with Lapis lazuli extracted from stones. It was used by emperors in Persia and India. I didn't enjoy this much as it was a bit messy and my piece broke too. When we went to see the exhibits I learnt that when the Mughals ate food in this kind of crockery, they could find out if the food was poisonous or not as it turned black if it was.

This art form came from 7th century. They were called murals . It was found in caves.

We observed the dancing girl statue from the Harappan civilisation. We learnt that it was made by a wax extract technique. We were given copper wires to use our own imagination and create a piece of our own. I tried to make a swan but it was too difficult but that was also because my hand was fractured and to turn the wire around was not easy.

This was scripts and communictaion used in ancient times. The kings used to write laws in Brahmi script but we made a pretend script and wrote our own messages. Can you guess what I wrote?

Well I wrote tips on how we should save our Earth. This was my favourite experience too!

This was an ancient game named Pachisi, a board game similar to Ludo. We need five dice to paly this game. Back then there were no dice but shells. On one side there was no 1 and others side had no 5. We made the game board with felt and used a mandala design in the middle.

I saved the best for the last. This art came from ancient Egypt. This is a woman with a flower and it was a portrait design. The symbols represent my name in the painting. We used carbon paper, gold acyclic paint to create tghis beautiful design.

This was a terracota clay experience which I thoroughly enjoyed. I loved the clay and enjoyed moulding it into beautiful pots. The pot designs were pre Colombian and from Indus valley civilisation. The designs were beautiful and I loved creating them.

The Craftopia program in the National museum, Delhi was a really entertaining and such a great learning experience, totally distinct from usual art classes because we saw the exhibits, experienced history and things from olden times first hand. The teachers were very friendly, patient and explained the concepts well. Vandita ma'am was amazing and very helpful. I would love to go back again for season ten and explore something new.

I hope you enjoyed reading about my summer experience. Which art did you like the most? Share in the comments and let me know.