I created this piece while studying under an Indian master painter who is striving to pass on this pre-Raj art form to the modern age.

I was amazed by how different this sort of painting was from watercolor, acrylic, oil or egg tempera. We created our own paint by mixing a powder called khalia (made from grinding a soft white stone found in India) combined with pigment and gum arabic (made by boiling down hardened sap from the acacia tree). We made black by mixing soot and gum arabic in seashells. There were many steps to the process, including preparing the cotton paper with strained khalia, using the soot mixture with soap nuts to paint our designs on clear vellum, and continual burnishing (rubbing the back of the paper with a marble stone on a glass board after the application of each color).