Warangal Urban: For 76-year-old Gudimalla Raghavendra Rao, retirement is not the end. He made a new beginning and pursued his passion which he could not do during his younger days due to family and work responsibilities.
Today, Raghavendra Rao is one of the very few artists in the state who can draw with their nails. Nail art is a very rare and unusual work which is not seen these days. Making a piece of art without using a pen, pencil, brush or oil paints is not easy.
It took him 55 years to master the art and he has made more than 150 paintings in the past 20 years. He is exploring new methods of carving and colouring the drawings.
A resident of Ranga-mpeta in Warangal, he retired as a pharmacist 20 years back. With both his daughters and son settled, he got busy working on sheets of paper turning them into marvellous works of art.
Mr Raghavendra Rao uses his thumb nails to carefully emboss a picture on a special thick paper. He uses organic colours brought from Gujarat to fill the pictures. He takes a cloth, dabs it in the powdered colour and rubs it on the required area. Only four colours are used with different combinations to get the desired gradients.
