This project was a part of my form-making course (at Srishti undergrad year 1) targeted at taking inspirations from something (an art form or a dance form) and then drawing that inspiration as the guiding principle for another project (compositions or products, anything).

We started by researching the different aspects (colors, shapes, patterns, etc) of a chosen art form/dance form, and then using this research to make abstract compositions.

For our final project submission we were to choose a platonic solid(a solid whose all faces are similar) and then using it (in any manner) to depict/show a narrative taking inspirations from the folk arts and folk dances we researched previously in the course.

As our facilitator (Tulip Sinha) was explaining the brief of the exercise, the idea of depicting the cycle of crop harvest and it’s deep relation to Bhangra, instantly came to my
mind.
Then almost randomly we decided to choose the Egyptian folk art to depict the Bhangra folk dance.
This attempt to marry these two art forms by representing one through the art style of the other, I believe, was our USP in this assignment.
For our form, we chose icosahedron, because it had continuous ten faces in the middle sandwiched layer, that would make reading of our narrative sensible. Although the ten faces ran continuously in a loop, it made sense to our tale because the cycle of cropping runs continuously as well. So even if one started reading from a face that wasn’t the first one, the narrative would still make sense.
Finally, for our top and bottom five faces, we decided to put a black dot to make our final form somewhat resemble a ‘Dhol’ and further add to the Bhangra twist of our artwork.

Concept note:

Final work:

After thoughts:

Although we did only a little experimentation with art forms, only one dance and
one drawing based, we learned quite a few crucial things as to where we can
actually take inspirations from, what all elements actually make up an art form
and what are the different ways we represent/execute that inspiration.
I can very well see myself using these learnings in a variety of things. Fashion
is one very direct means. But that is not my field. In animation (my learning
aspiration), however, I can very well use it for character designing. So I can first
study what the background of my character is, and then go about adding
elements to it to represent the background.