As he sketches the live model sitting nude, the hands and toes of the drawing keep disappearing.

Thematic confusion amongst the teachers

Task of preserving the excellence of Indian decoration and improving it with the techniques of Indian naturalism. They were expected to improve the flat design ty learning to reproduce them three dimensionally. The exercise was self defeating, because one had to choose between flat or illusionist treatment but not both at once. Once one moves towards the mimetic representation of objects in natural light, one if forced to sacrifice some of the formal clarity and pure colour arrangement, strength of non representational art.

Ends at the art school

Where Lock broke with the government aims was offering specialization in the visual arts; elementary paintings, modeling and design, technical design, lithography, wood engraving and photography.

At the school, only second in popularity to portraiture was book illustration.

No one denies for a moment that any artistic achievement demands a proper training of the eye and the hand. But at the same time there is a need for a balance between skill and creativity.

Accuracy of imitation to the neglect of imagination was a limitation of colonial art teaching, as was the insistence on drawing as a branch of geometry- far better to emulate humbly the given pattern than to break out into adventurous original.

Shilpa Pushpanjai contained lessons in elementary drawing and shading- ovals, tetrafoils and quadrifoils. As the eye must guide the hand, so the mind must learn to observe the significant outlines of objects.

Drawing must be made compulsory in the Empire.