HYDERABAD: Naresh Ravulapalli, a civil engineering graduate who is pursuing a CAD designing course in Hyderabad, started doing what he calls ‘wax digital art’ – mixing wax kind of figurine work on digital canvas. He says such art is gaining ground.
This Madhapur resident did not undergo any formal art course to take this up, but calls himself a self-taught artist. “My favourite class was the art class while in school. In 2018, I managed to turn my passion into a profession by turning into a wax digital artist. He takes up digital and caricature digital art.
“My work looks like a physical mini wax statue, but of course the finishing has digital touch ups using Macbook, iPad and some advanced art software. So it is a notch above the regular art work,” he says. He started doing it solo four years ago and now they are a team of three. The work involves layout, colour gradin, background and finishing and it takes about a day to finish one work.
“Wax digital art model takes fives hours to finish while a wax caricature art model takes a day to be completed.”Naresh says that he gets requests from friends and family for special occasions and wedding invitations and from fab clubs for their favourite stars. The pricing is anywhere between Rs 600- 10,000 and they take 10 days for to deliver the e-copy.
Then the same can be printed on T-shirts, coffee mugs, for phone skins etc. “We used to deliver in glasses frames, but delivery posed challenges because of its fragile nature and now they have stuck to soft copy which can be printed on multiple canvasses. Naresh says they have serviced over 500 clients so far and a few are Tollywood bigwigs such as director Gopichand Mailineni, actor Rajesh, singer Smitha, Manasi and actor Karthikeya and Nandu. Currently, they accept requests via Iam.Nareshben page on Instagram.