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A spread of seed-paper calendar pages, each with a watercolour painting of women farming and cooking, in Adani Foundation's blue Printed on seed paper

Craft · illustration · a calendar that is planted in January

Their photographs, painted by hand.

Adani Foundation's SuPoshan programme has years of field photographs: women in kitchen gardens, children at meals, baskets of what grew. We turned twelve of them into watercolour illustrations, printed them on seed paper, and sent out 500 of them for the New Year: a calendar that can be planted when the year is done.

Brief something like this

12months, each one a painting of something the programme actually did
Client
Adani Foundation · Fortune SuPoshan
Piece
Plantable desk calendar on a wooden easel, with a pen, in a jute bag
Paper
Seed paper: plant any page after its month
Artwork
Field photographs redrawn in watercolour by our illustrator
Quantity
500 calendars
From photographs to bags
Two weeks

Why not just print the photographs?

Because a photograph of a programme looks like a report. A painting of the same moment looks like a memory. The people in it are still the people in it, the garden is still their garden, but the eye stays longer.

And because the calendar is printed on seed paper, which takes watercolour the way it takes ink: softly. Each month's page ends in a pot, so the painting of a kitchen garden becomes, eventually, a kitchen garden.

Depicting our work in a beautiful and share-worthy manner.

From the client's own words, published on bioq.in.

Photograph, then painting.

The field photographs on the left, our illustrator's watercolours on the right. Nothing is invented: the people, the plants and the baskets are the ones in the pictures.

Two women picking tomatoes in a field, and the same scene as a watercolour A woman watering a kitchen garden beside a man bending to it, and the same scene painted Baskets of greens, tomatoes, eggs and grain seen from above, and the same arrangement painted

How it was made.

From a pencil sketch to a sealed jute bag, in our own studio and workshop.

  1. A hand sketching the scene in pencil beside the photographSketchedOur illustrator draws each photograph in pencil first.
  2. The same sketch being painted in watercolourPaintedThen paints it in watercolour, by hand.
  3. The calendar pages being laid out on a laptopComposedArtwork, the month and the programme's notes, set on each page.
  4. Printed seed-paper sheets being cut and tied into setsPrinted and cutPrinted on seed paper, cut to size, tied in sets.
  5. Three people sorting calendar sets on a tableSortedTwelve months in order, every set checked.
  6. A hand tying a printed tag onto a jute bagTaggedEach jute bag gets the programme's tag.
  7. A woman packing calendar sets into jute bagsPackedCalendar, wooden easel and pen, into the bag.
  8. A pile of sealed jute bags ready to goSealed and sentOne person seals every bag. Then they go.
The kit laid out: wooden easel, pen, jute bag and the calendar
What came in the bag: easel, pen, calendar
The calendar standing on its wooden easel
On the desk

Film

When January is over, plant January.

Seed paper goes into a pot under a thin layer of soil, is kept moist, and sprouts. This is our own film of the paper being planted.

Adani · custom calendars

Such a pleasant surprise for everyone who got these hand-painted calendars, customised specially for us, depicting our work in a beautiful and share-worthy manner.

Read the story

A calendar of your own.

The plantable calendars in the collection take your photographs, your artwork or our illustrations.

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How many, by when, the budget per gift. We reply on WhatsApp within a day, with a shortlist and rates before GST.

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