The brief had a happy coincidence built in: Kathakali's Pacha makeup already paints the noble, heroic character green, which is exactly the mural's guna code for the serene, sattvic register — so the green face here is true to both traditions at once. The real problem was the costume, an avalanche of pleats and gold that could swamp a flat panel, so we seated one dominant performer at the mirror in the calm of the green room and read the great white-and-red skirt as broad flat fields rather than rendered cloth, keeping the white chutti face-frame crisp and reducing the dressers to two figures behind. A brass lamp and a row of makeup pots anchor the backstage. The density stays medium-light, the warm ochre ground open, so the eye reads the painted face first.