Nine-year-old creates tutorial to paint tricolour

With India's 66th Independence Day round the corner, a nine-year-old girl has created an online video tutorial to help people get the tricolour painted on their faces, nails or other parts of the body. For Arkshya Raj Kalra, a fifth standard student of K.R. Mangalam School in Gurgaon, getting her face painted with the tricolour is fun. She gets her face painted not only on Independence and Republic Day but also during cricket matches between India and other countries.

Arkshya said that gave birth to the idea of why not do a makeup in Indian patriotic colours in such a way that it becomes a fashion statement. Being curious and having good knowledge of computers, she decided to create a tutorial to help her friends get the tricolour painted on their faces. "Before applying the paint on my face, I wanted to see how it would look like. With the help of my father, I created the tutorial using photoshop software," she said.

"Now I can experiment with the colours on my picture, and apply it in different ways that suit my dress," Arkshya said. Arkshya, along with her father, has created a set of 51 tutorial chapters, dealing with common problems associated with an amateur pictures.

"Sometimes people barge in when you are taking pictures near a monument, at times the sun is dull and the pictures don't portray what we actually saw, sometime we forget to dye our hair and the white hair spoils our look and sometimes the most dreaded of all, the pictures which are perfect to enlarge for the drawing room have to be thrown away because of wardrobe malfunction," she said.
Arkshya was upset with one photograph in which her father had grey hair, mother had pimples and she had "dracula teeth". To find a solution, she learned photoshop with her father Rajesh Kalra, and suddenly that gave her an idea to start free online tutorials so that others can also rectify their photographs.

She would start one of her tutorials on Independence Day, in which she with her father's help would try to teach online how to apply make-up like the Indian tricolour on their faces. Arkshya said children of her age spend a lot of time online these days and interact through social media. In this communication, pictures play an important role. The tutorials will be available on the website rkphotomagictrix.com.