The
Making
Every painting here took days, and there is no undo. Pigment ground by hand, a bamboo pen loaded, a kohbar going in one line at a time — in the villages of Madhubani, Ranti and Jitwarpur.
- Drawn
- straight in ink
- Corrections
- none possible
- A dense field
- a week of hands
How a painting is made
6 stages, in the order they happen. None of them can be undone.
- 01
The paper
A thick cotton-rag sheet, heavy enough to take pigment without cockling. Some artists first wash it with a cow-dung solution, which dries odourless and leaves the warm ochre ground you see under older work.
- 02
The pen
A bamboo twig frayed at one end, or a thin stick wrapped with a pinch of cotton — the amount of cotton sets the width of the line. Fine work is done with a nib.
- 03
The line
Drawn straight in ink, usually with no pencil beneath it. The composition is held in the head, not sketched out. A line once laid cannot be lifted off handmade paper.
- 04
The fill
Either bharni — flat, saturated colour inside a bold outline — or kachni, where the tone is built from hundreds of individual hatched lines. Kachni can take five times as long on the same sheet.
- 05
The filling of the field
Any gap left after the figures is filled with flowers, birds, dots and hatching. Empty space is considered inauspicious, so the painting is finished only when it is full.
- 06
The border
A double line enclosing the whole sheet, with a repeating pattern between. It marks the work as complete, and its slight drift at the corners is one of the surest signs of a hand.
From the studio
Filmed by the artists themselves, in their own homes. Tap any frame to watch it full size.
This is what you're buying
A print can look like this. It cannot be made like this. The Handbook has the checks you can run yourself, on any painting, anywhere.