Research project

(Cont.)Interviewed Patachitra artist – Anwar At Dastkaar Fair, New Delhi

Layout design

Once the song is ready, the Patuas start with the pencil drawing of the scroll painting

Mythological stories don’t have much experiment in layouts as all Patuas work on the same storyline and they don’t want to break their ancestral traditional style.

The size of the scroll varies from story to story.

Border space is the first thing to be marked followed by planning and distributing the story into different panels. The size of each panel depends upon the weight of the scene to be depicted. Important scenes are always depicted in bigger panels.

Patuas experiment a lot with layouts. They explore interesting ways to depict a story to get the desired response from the audience.

Layout design completely depends on the nature and the demand of the storyline. In order to classify them to understand better one can mainly divide them into 3 major styles of layouts-

a) Distribute the story into various boxes (panels)

In this the first box is the most attractive and largest in size to catch the viewer’s attention and the following boxes are planned as half, one-third or one forth to the first box depending on the requirement of the story

b) Pick the most important character from the story and place it large on the whole scroll

The scenes to be depicted are planned around this which makes the whole appearance of the scroll look very dynamic.

c) Combination of both the layout styles mentioned above

Patuas try to make the layout look as rhythmic as they can so that the pictures blend well with the flow of the song when sung in front of the audience.