Tracing is common place when multiple copies of the same image are required. It is also interesting when the images being traced and the background landscape appear to have nothing to do with each other. In this painting the deities appear to float on the background composition without any relationship to the physical landscape depicted. The HAR team has taken the liberty of separating the deities from the background to see what they might look like on their own and to see how the landscape might appear in a re-construction without the deities obscuring the view.
It would make for a fascinating study to take this painting of HAR #432 and do a surface analysis with infrared photography to see if the landscape composition was painted first and the deities placed on top after. That of course would be highly unusual since Tibetan drawing generally starts with the main figures of a composition. However, this composition is already unusual and appears created as a collage of different unrelate elements. Maybe HAR visitors and users have ideas about how this art is created and the thinking that goes into it?
