The brief was to paint Dakshinamurthy as the still centre of a teaching, not a busy crowd scene, so the composition holds one dominant green-bodied Shiva under the banyan with the listening rishis ranged in calm symmetry below. The chinmudra — thumb and forefinger joined — is the whole point of this form: the supreme teacher who instructs in silence, facing south. The green body is deliberate; in Kerala's guna code green marks the serene, sattvic divine, exactly the register of Dakshinamurthy. We kept the density medium-light so the eye reads the deity, the tiger skin, the small crouched Apasmara under the pendant foot, and only then the gathered sages, with the warm ochre ground left to breathe and the banyan canopy closing the top.