The Process
From Sketch
to Palette Knife
How a pencil drawing becomes a thick, textured oil painting
The Sketch
Every painting begins as a pencil sketch — often drawn on location or from memory. Sandhya captures the essential composition: the weight of a fort wall, the curve of temple steps, the way figures cluster at a ghat. The sketch is quick and observational, focused on light and structure rather than detail.
Pencil sketch — Dashashwamedh Ghat, Varanasi The Composition
The sketch evolves into a compositional study. Sandhya maps out the major shapes, the light source, the colour temperature. For a ghat painting, this means deciding where warm sandstone catches golden light and where cool shadows fall across the water. The composition is the architecture — the painting is built upon it.
Compositional study — Radha Rani Temple, Barsana The Palette Knife
Sandhya paints almost exclusively with palette knives — flat, flexible steel blades that drag, scrape, and layer thick oil paint onto canvas. Unlike brushes, which blend and soften, the palette knife creates texture with real three-dimensional depth. Each stroke is a decision — once laid, it stays.
Different blade shapes create different effects: narrow knives for architectural edges, wide blades for sweeping skies, pointed tips for fine details in temple domes and figures.
Palette knives — the tools of impasto painting The Texture
Impasto — Paint You Can Feel
Impasto is the technique of applying paint so thickly that the strokes create visible texture on the canvas surface. Light catches the ridges and valleys of paint, giving the work a physical presence that changes with viewing angle.
Warm palette — raw sienna, cadmium yellow, burnt umber 
Cool meets warm — cerulean, viridian, ochre Where It Happens
The studio is where memory becomes material. Sandhya works from her sketches and from the places she carries in her mind — the exact colour of Govardhan sandstone at sunset, the way monsoon light filters through Varanasi's narrow lanes, the weight of Rajput fort walls against a desert sky.
Materials: oil paints (cadmium yellows, raw sienna, burnt umber, vermillion, cerulean blue, viridian green, ivory black), palette knives of varying widths, stretched linen canvas. No brushes. No shortcuts.
The studio — canvas, knives, and natural light 
Oil paints — the raw materials 
Raw linen canvas — the ground