From 'Marchesa Elena Grimaldi Cattaneo' by Anthonis van Dyck (1623) and 'Japanese Girl Jumps' by Suzuki Harunobu (1750) to 'A portrait of umbrella (children without a roof on their head take shelter under a tattered umbrella)' by MF Husain (2005), umbrellas have been appearing in art through the centuries. When it comes to children's books, the ones that top our list are 'The Blue Umbrella' by Ruskin Bond and 'Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs' by Judi Barrett.
And now we have another artist who has chosen to bring an umbrella into her visual story and even managed to flip it to use it as a boat. We're certain that all our young readers are going to be beaming with delight at the school of fish which has been presented by Shailja in interesting patterns.
If you're wondering why Shailja decided to donate her artwork to the #6FrameStoryChallenge, here's what she said:
“I absolutely loved the idea of drawing out a story with a few words as a take of point. The idea sounded very inviting. The open source story publishing platform sounds very interesting and I am very keen to understand the full extent of this initiative. I would love to share my little contribution to support Pratham Books and their wonderful work and initiative.”
(Love for Lines and Cinema took Shailja Jain Chougule to the National Institute of Design, Ahmadabad, where she studied Animation Film Design. She loves dogs, trees, walking and weaving together words & visuals.You can see more of her work here: https://shailjaj.wordpress.com/illustrations/)
Read the other interviews by illustrators who took the challenge:
Rajiv Eipe, Kalyani Ganapathy, Prashant Miranda, Kavita Singh Kale, Megha Vishwanath, Priya Nair Panicker, Sweta Roy Choudhury, Paneendra Suresh, Priya Kuriyan, Yulianto Qin, Manjari Chakravathi, Sonal Goyal and Sumit Sakhuja, Samidha Gunjal, Preeti Lata, Shwetha Elisha,Mithila Ananth, Sunandita Mehrotra, Vedavathi Narasimha Murthy, Jithin Jacob, Vidya Gopal,Archana Sreenivasan, Somesh Kumar, Gumani, Antara Mukherji, Anjora Noronha,Vinayak Varma, Soumya Menon, Jisha Unnikrishnan, Kruttika Susarla, Ninoshka Dias, Isha S Valentine, Neelima Raparla, Vallabhi Shegaonkar, Sangeeta Das, Hari Kumar Nair,Lakhsmi Mitter, Lily Banerjee , Aditi Dilip, Niloufer Wadia, Deepa Jayaraman,AnupamaApte,Nishith Mehta, Muhammed Shafi, Amar Soni, Krishna Prakash K,Lavanya Karthik, Sonal Gupta,Kabini Amin, Jason Dvorak, Tanvi Bhat, Ranjani S, Shikha Nambiar, Aritra Roy Chowdhury, Vaishali Chudasama, Sharanya Kunnath, Priya Manikandan,Milan Nayak, Delwyn Remedios, Geetanjali B, Ambica Vinod
If you missed the #6FrameStoryChallenge, but are inspired by the work of fellow illustrators and want to contribute to the open source story platform - do send us your stories! Story guidelines are available here.