004: Just for the Summer

"Just for this summer", my mom told me when she enrolled me in an Arabic calligraphy class and I was not having it. I mean I just had given my O level exams two weeks ago after months and months of sleepless studying and I certainly didn’t have the will to go and listen to someone talk about painting for hours. 

I mean I did like to paint in my free time but I just wanted to lay in bed and sleep for weeks without any care in the world. As they say, going to bed without any academic stress is certainly the best slumber of all. 

When you realise that you no longer have to wake up at four in the morning to do Maths past papers and then read practicals for the Biology exam your whole body screams with the joy of endless social media scrolling. 

But that’s what I wanted to do…

When does life even happen the way you want it to? Anyway, after five weeks of different brush stroke techniques, canvas preparation, colour patterns and writing styles I was on top of the world. I mean who doesn’t like to brag that they learnt a new skill in the summer while all other friends were frolicking in the mountains up north, going to movies or having sleepovers.  

Yeah, there’s fun in that, but for how long? Two weeks? A month? But a newly learned skill lasts however long you want it to. So there I was buying some canvases and taking inspiration from Pinterest and Instagram and making paintings. I mean it took hours but painting after studying Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Maths and Urdu for 3 years I was over the moon. 

Only then did I realise that my last painting was in 2019 when I had no clue what on Earth calligraphy was. And that it was worth a lot.

So, I picked up a random canvas and prepared it. Sanded it to remove the pre-painted white paint so the surface gets smooth for the brush to slide on it. What every other person does is to paint the canvas with Gesso, but I wasn’t taught to use Gesso instead I was directed to use Sennelier Modelling Paste. 

Then I only used four strokes on the canvas; up, down, left and right. The main colours that I used were Phthalo Blue, Olive Green, Dark Green, Crimson Red, Sky Blue and Emerald Green. 

Used normal chalk to write down the words of Surah Ikhlas. Mixed white paint with some water and make a paste type consistency. Traced all over the chalk. Mind you it took me six coats of white to get an opaque white on the canvas. 

All my hardwork had to then wait until the paint dried and boy did it take time? My impatient self was too jittery to just finish the painting and get over with it.

Paint? Dried. Next step? Colour the corners golden. The same paste with White and water was made but with Golden colour and water and two coats were enough to get an opaque colour.

Then again the most impatient step. Drying. Waiting.

After the canvas was fully dried I used varnish and sprayed with Lacquer spray just to be sure.

Then the most hand hurting part came and it was to remove the canvas cloth from the frame. And even my ancestors in their graves were concerned with the way I was removing the staple pins. My hands hurt for two days straight because of how  immaturely I removed the staple pins. Even punctured my thumb during the process.

Finally tried to take aesthetic pictures but got tired and just took normal pictures which took up my phone’s storage. And I was done. 

Tada!