More sights

Getting back to our travels, we went to Mahabalipuram, part of a 7th century dynasty, with massive rocks and rock cliffs. As you can see from the photo at the right, artists spent some serious time carving figures in the stone. I liked the little elephants under the big ones...

so I drew them.





This wall represents only a small fraction of the amazing carvings located here. Whole temples with bas reliefs and pillars and inner rooms were carved out of the huge stone cliffs. As we left, we saw a stone boulder with cruder, unfinished carved figures in no particular pattern; the guide said this was a "practice" stone, perhaps for evaluating a carver's talent.



Here's a photograph of some of the bas reliefs we found inside the temples. Very sophisticated work.





Our first glimpse of monkeys came as we climbed steps here to see a temple carved on top of a hill of stone. Not having drawn monkeys before, I was working out their shape in my mind, as you can see here.


We headed out & over to another complex of unfinished temples. There, the grounds were being weeded by several women, two of whom I drew. As usual, the clothes presented a kaleidescope of pleasure.

This complex included some gigantic stone sculptures of several animals, one of which was the elephant shown below. You can see a couple of tourists taking advantage of his shadow-- the day was quite hot.