Griselda El Tayib

Her preferred artistic genre was watercolor painting, and her personal style has been called a kind of "realistic impressionism", where she "often succeeds in capturing the essence of life itself.

[4] Apart from these studies in her main field of expertise, El Tayib also published articles on the Sudanese folk instrument kissar[5] and on women's education in Sudan.

In this study of 320 pages, she described "details of indigenous costumes worn by Sudanese, in North, East and Central Riverain Sudan, during the first half of this century before radical political and social changes introduced an irreversible trend towards westernisation.

"[12] The plan was to start with those ethnic groups in Northern Sudan where rapidly increasing urbanization, major mass media influence and the population movements due to resettlement were threatening the extinction of certain distinct forms of dress.

The need to record all this in the 1970s was very urgent, for already within two-and-a-half decades I had personally witnessed the disappearance of the bullama face veil, the gurgab, a waist wrapper, the women's markub, flat open shoes, and karkab wooden clogs, and increasingly also of the crescent shaped earrings called fidayat and the zumam, nose ornament, all of which were quite common in the early 1950s.In the 1987 collective publication The Sudanese Woman, she contributed a chapter on Women's dress in the Northern Sudan.

Each of the regions studied here was subjected to different internal and external influences which affect clothing: trade and availability of various items, or imitation of conquerors, leaders and other high prestige groups.