Day three hundred and thirty-eight: A visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Asian galleries this afternoon led to my encounter with “Dancing Ganesha,” a sandstone sculpture made circa 750 in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, India. Today’s sketch focuses on a detail of the Hindu deity’s elephant head. I was quite pleased to find myself able to sketch and shade the forms with hatch marks that are somewhat systematic. That’s not to say that many of my decisions to make the shading lines move in one direction or another were a bit arbitrary, but I felt like a real artist for a flickering moment. Mostly, I enjoyed imagining myself scratching away on a copper plate with an etching needle.
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