Bhauji No.01

I know it's been quite some time since I last put up a post here. There is no excuse for it, but then sometimes you need only a small excuse to take time off work and make a birthday card. Here's one I made for my sister-in-law. The titles are set on the note of Bhojpuri films. 

It was after a really long time that I sat so long on one piece of work. It was done in a rushing and gushing storm of a deadline, so strong was the stress that I ate a bag of chips and skipped my tea. You can gauge the intensity with the sacrifice I just mentioned. 

Hopefully I get to do more of such stuff. It's always nice to do work for people who are around you but our profession keeps us away from not even paying a token of appreciation.  

You can see the poster in a larger dimension here.

Thank you, Aditi Goenka for the title suggestion.

Tales from Indian Classics

It has been a terribly long time since I blogged about something substantial. This time of the year is going pretty cramped with work and deadlines, so much that putting blog posts have gone down on the planner pages. But I guess one can only keep up with the untiring wheel as long as the cog lasts.

I went home in June and visited Ara for a few hours. The memories it brought back could be measured in inches of dust settled on the furniture. It weighed me down and then to embrace it further I opened the doors of almirahs where souvenirs of days bygone were preserved. I knew which memory I was scratching the surface of. My father used to do most of the book purchasing from Patna Book Fair and would then carry the lot to Ara. In one of the trips, he must have got this picture book called 'Tales from Indian Classics'. The book had short stories from Mahabharata, Ramayana, Vedas and Upnishads. One of the stories was on an Bhasmasura, an Asura who met his plight by putting his right hand on his head while dancing with Mohini (an Apsara). To mention it as a common experience for most of us, there are some illustrations from picture books read at a younger age that always gets pinned into the visual memory of our brain. It would usually be an artwork that had an unusual imagery, a moment to creep us out, scare us or even make us laugh because it had something beyond the ordinary to it. I took the book out and quickly flipped open the page which had the illustration of Bhasmasura. I wished to see if it could still amuse me, and it did. I wonder if it was just the nostalgia at work or some unknown logic driving my senses.

Bhasmasura

To freshen up the inspiration index, I have scanned a few more pages from the book. The illustrations are done by Pulak Biswas and Sukumar Chatterjee. When seeing work of elder illustrators, the faith gets restored on how the very lack of options is often liberating to the skill and enjoyable to the senses.

Opening Page

Inside Page

Ganapathi

The House of Lac

Bhima and Hanuman

Cousins and Enemies

Bakasura

Gayan

Kacha and Devayani

Sundan and Upasundan

Table Tennis

Some days I think fondly of some creation and others I grimly accept that it's not very good. It's hard, you want so much to produce good and meaningful work but it can never possibly live up to your own expectations. Every work is ultimately a failure. How could it be anything but? The only work that ever succeeds is someone else's.

- Seth, CR Sunday Interview 

The lines above sum it all up for me. Making comics is an arduous task, many find the short format of it difficult, but for me it's the idea of making a fat book which frightens me. Ten months back, a good share of enthusiasm and belief made me compile 25 pages of my comic, but it took me only a few months to be dissatisfied with it. I had taken feedback from people, while most of it was encouraging, I, myself could see the lack of narrative discourse on the pages. The use of language in the comic was slightly off, it felt like sitting in an office wheel chair while working on a mahogany vintage desk. Language is a big cultural parameter, finding its substitute in another language is not an easy pie for novices like me. We need to leave the task of a professional to a professional. Another question which rang in my head was "How do we remember our past? Is it with characters, objects, songs or events?" To me it's events that connect the dots. Objects and characters are fragments of the event, they add decor and flavour to the anecdotes. The past is always dissected as thread of events in our memory, we just see it as a stitched fabric. Having done 25 pages already, I decided to move ahead with the comic and then rework the finished pages later. Some of the key decisions taken with the comic are - 

1. To make smaller comic strips for each event, this will come together to form the larger picture. It will provide freedom in making the closure for the story, and altering the drawing style. It will also take the pressure off from doing a brick shaped thick book. 

2. Use Hindi as the language for the comic. It will help in serving the story less unadulterated, although it can be translated to English later on by a good copy writer to make it available for a larger audience. 

3. Draw the way you like to draw. 

I am sharing the very first page I created with all these thoughts in my head. This is for the comic strip titled 'Table Tennis'. The type is hand drawn, working with Devanagiri script is surprisingly easy for me than the Roman one. I have used India ink for the inking, and then coloured it digitally. 

High res file here. 

Flume

It all started two weeks back when I went to Avenue Road and Commercial Street for some stationery shopping. It was a long pending task which I had ignored for sometime because of work overload. As illustrators, one of the basic ingredient of our work should be to use the right medium fit for the task, using the right paper, ink, brushes etc. is the salt of a good artwork. I roamed around the busy market streets, managed to get a good stock of paper, india inks, thin tipped brushes and other miscellaneous tools. I bought all these specifically for working on the pages of my comic, but when you own good equipments, your responsibilities increase towards its usage. Every gsm of the paper weighs you down to be good, it demands justice. When I was done pencilling a page, I realised that I better to do something else before inking the page. I had to be sure if the ink and water consistency will work well on the page. I needed a warm up exercise, so I picked a song to dedicate this artwork to, it's called 'flume', performed by Bon Iver in their very first album 'For Emma Forever Ago'. I had heard a few tracks of Bon Iver before, but it was only two months back when I got hold of their first entire album. Thank you, Mr. Kunal Sen for this. I was busy with a big project then, and most of my days would just go sitting in my room and working. This was when I started listening to their album from beginning to end, one song to another. 

Flume was the first song on the list and with each repeated play it kept growing on me. It had an eerie wailing calm to it that complimented my lone days with work. I then read about the history of this album, Justin Vernon wrote and composed the entire album sitting in his father's cabin which was nestled into the woods. He was recuperating from an illness, a broken relationship and band that got dissolved months back. All these things must have created a void for him to fill up. I have often believed that the finest work of a musician comes out from nurturing a wound. Flume as a song is the sapling of that wound that is being healed and protected. 

Now, getting back to the warm up exercise (which I knew would not be a short one), I had a visual image in my head for the song. I believe it picked the references from the interview and articles I read about the album, but the image was not built as a forced chain of thought, it was a spontaneous result that got framed with no particular intent. At one point of time I had three different live versions of Flume running on Grooveshark while working on this artwork. I started sketching it on paper, fleshing out the idea visually. Since it started as a doodle, I sort of strayed away from the clarity of information being conveyed. I was eager to use the inks, so I rushed towards the second step of process, which compromised the appeal of the artwork. Anyway, here are some photographs of the process and the final artwork - 

Click here for larger size.

Click here for larger size

There's some text hidden in the trees, please let me know if you figured what it is. I think I failed in doing a good job with it. Anyway, enough talk on warm up exercise, I should start work on my comic now. Although, I hope I have paid my debts to this song for keeping me company in my room.

If you feel like sharing this artwork around on the web, feel free to do it, but please put the credits on my name with a link to the blog. 

Old Shoe and New Comic

After spending a month travelling around Gujarat and Delhi, I am finally back to my room. I have been dying to get back and start work because probably that's the only way I know to be sane and literally in working condition. I had packed pretty economically for my travel which allowed me to carry only one casual pair of shoe, which I made full use of. I once had an accident in those shoes, so they looked pretty ragged to begin with, but a full marinated blessing of Kutch Salt desert and black mud slush added a whole new class to it. I wore them around each day and in Comic Con too where the shiny pointy shoes must have given it quite a bit of attention. But I walked around, doing my book purchase which really overshot it's estimate. All the more reason to love my old pair of shoes. Now that I am loaded with pending work list, I thought it would be good to get warmed up to the needed act. Therefore dear readers, I bring you a page which pays homage to people with old shoes and good comics/books. 

You can check the larger size of the image here. 

This one really helped me get back to my brush pen usage, and I affirm this again - inking will always be the best part of making comics. There are some sketches from the trip too which I shall put up soon too. 

Brainwave, February 2013

The year 2013 started with a lot of tasks unchecked on the to-do list. I had sketches to finish for an Amar Chitra Katha project, posts for Perch Project, and printing the first 25 pages of my graphic novel. All this had to be done before I began my one month travel, but by mid January I managed to put a tick on all of the above. With my planner scribbled with all the work and chores, the small illustration work for Brainwave took a back seat. It seemed difficult to be doing everything, and in the process being all over the place with watered down work. I doubt if there would be any Brainwave illustrations for the coming months, but February has two of my small artworks in the issue. 

The above artwork is for an article on Arvind Gupta, the toy maker who helps make Science a whole lot of fun with putting up scraps and wastes together as playful instruments. You can check out his DIY toys on - Arvind Gupta Toys. I used Uniball 'Posca' pens for this artwork, the marker has pigment based ink which comes out as thick fat coating on paper giving it a screen print quality. The patters are derived from some of his toys like kaleidoscope, origami paper crafts, and toys made of matchboxes, straws etc. 

This artwork is for a fan fiction section written by a young reader. This piece describes a perfectly balanced  eco-system where humans are more empathetic, which I believe must have left whales, crocodiles and tigers very relieved. The dolphins are not bothered about this, they will scoot away anyway before Vogons take notice. 

I am putting this post up in the middle of my travelling using a borrowed computer. There is plenty of work grumbling up at my desk awaiting my return. But for now, I am hopping trains and smelling new landscapes. Some photos should be up soon when I return, although the woes of developing film rolls await me too. 

Benjamin Franklin, Brainwave

I made two spot illustrations for an article on Benjamin Franklin and his flirtations with lightening in the new January issue of Brainwave. The two Brainwave characters, Alby and Arby time travel to meet Mr. Franklin. There they get to know how the man behind the invention of lightening rod had flown a kite with a key attached to the string to find out the electric nature of lightening. Apart from his contributions towards Science, Benjamin Franklin had a good share in America's freedom Struggle too. 

Page 25

I believe this will be my last post on the blog for the year 2012. To look back, one of the biggest accomplishment of this year was to quit my job and start work on my book. I had many thoughts muddled in my head during the mid year as to what direction I should take my work to. But with the year coming to an end, it seems pretty sorted for now. Apart from the book, I am glad for the onset of Perch Project too. I am very thankful to Hazel for this, doing this project alone wouldn't have been possible. A bow of honour to all the people who have shared the enthusiasm towards Perch Project. Your 'likes' and 'shares' are not just mere social network tools, but a fuel to the project's belief and will to grow further. The fat bird of Perch Project blesses you all. No doubt that next year awaits a work avalanche with many plans brewing, but I hope to take it well and merge it with some travel plans too. 

To talk a bit more about the book, I doubt that if I can have a definite calendar for it to wrap it up. Many other projects need to start growing simultaneously, and the book is something I wouldn't want to hurry on. Although, I have to be cautious to not let it slip off. 

Last week, I finished the 25th page of my book. This page came from a snug hole memory of my childhood days. The days when the whole locality used to gather up at the few homes where a T. V. set was available to watch the evening films being shown on Door Darshan. We had a 'Weston' television, neighbourhood  kids, and some elders would gather in our drawing room for the Saturday films. Jaggery, puffed rice and roasted gram was the popcorn of a small town. Those who had other task to move on to or couldn't find a place inside would watch the film through the window grill. 

I believe such evenings don't belong to just my childhood, but of many others who grew up in late eighties and early nineties. I have tried to capture those evenings in the page 25 of the book. I imagined it to be more of a crowded page, but subconsciously the elements from the drawing room's decor propped into the page too while I was penciling. It seemed justified to let these things retain its share in the page. Here are the three step process of drawing, inking and colouring the page - 

Ionicus

Whenever I am in the MG Road vicinity, tea at Koshy's and then strolling down to Blossom's on Church Street has become an old habit. At Blossom's I would drop my bag at the counter and climb the stairs up to look for new graphic novels and hunt for old editions of classics. During one of such activities, I came across the P. G. Wodehouse series published by Penguin with covers done by an illustrator who signed off as 'Ionicus'. The cover had crumpled edges, but the artwork it embodied had crisp, clean lines demarcating the skilled use of watercolours. It had a simplicity and beauty one would like to belong to, and the pictures told the reader what awkwardness was stored in the book. From that day onwards, I have often spent a lot of time excruciating my eye filtering such publications out of huge stacks lying in the back shelves of Blossom's. With luck, I have found four so far. I believe, the staff only shell out a few copies out to keep luring me in time after time. And like a cat, I know the precious bait too well to surrender. If any of you lucky ones have got a copy of Ionicus's illustrated cover, please do mail me a scan of it on somsesh@gmail.com. I will be extremely grateful to you for this. 

Ionicus was the pen name of Joshua Armitage (26 September 1913 – 1998), an English illustrator.

He is best known for drawing the covers for a wide range of Penguin editions of P. G. Wodehouse, though he also contributed cartoons and drawings to Punch for more than 40 years, and provided cover designs and text illustrations for nearly 400 books in total.

- Wikipedia

Brainwave. Issue 25. Doomsday Alerts

Apart from being a hermit, and working on my graphic novel, I have been doing occasional freelance work for Brainwave. The next issue's theme was decided long time ago by the Mayans when they ran out of wall space to extend the calendar dates. Which has over the years helped a lot of production houses and news channels in killing air time with their Nostradamus gymnastics. Leaving the horrendously looped conspiracy videos aside, here's my take on the cover - 

I also did a spot illustration for the 'Geek Speak' section. 

The Cat has Perched.

After the small success of the post on Common Myna done for Perch Project, Hazel and I decided to get a bit more challenging with the next post. We chose the Domestic Cat as our next animal to be rescued. In the beginning we thought that the availability of information won't be a trouble for this post, but we were overwhelmed by the amount of text. Generally, large amount of instructional text can leave a reader a bit daunted, therefore we opted to break it into charts, worksheet and illustrations that can bring in relief to the reading eye. Hazel being the more knowledgable one, got busy with writing the text, making charts and worksheets, while I had to draw the cat. I knew right from the start that unlike the birds, a furry cat would surely be a lot more difficult. To be honest, I am not a pro at using watercolours, and when doing science illustrations that are meant to be precise and do the job of identifying the drawn subject well, one shouldn't falter. Not to forget, getting the anatomy right is an ardent task too. Some of my initial drawings of the kitten looked like sausages. I kept drawing it day after day but nothing good turned out. Finally, when the time was not in my favour, I decided to cheat by using pencil colours. I console myself over this by telling myself time after time, 'It was all for the right cause.' Here are some of the better ones done during the process - 

The final days of putting the Perch post up were pretty crazy. If one goes through our chat history, they would find enough evidence to prove us lunatics. Here's one - 'Also, can we make the poo a bit 3d?'
You can check out the post here. We have also made a facebook page - Perch Project, 'Like' the page if you would like to get future updates from Perch. 
You should read Hazel's post too - Domestic Cat on Half Chai.

Brainwave. Issue 24. Mad Maladies

The November issue of Brainwave hit the stands last week. Being the last print on which I have worked on as the designer, I would say that this issue has been art directed by me at large sparing a few pages and decisions. Art directing a magazine is no child's play and I am thankful that the design template is in place to not do things from the scratch. But approaching the right illustrators, giving them design brief, approving sketches, nagging for handling over of final files is one big responsibility to deal with. The amount of post-it notes exhausted on this process was a good evidence in this case. Once all this is done, I switched into the role of a designer to put all the pages together, include required design changes, re check and correct all pages once it's proofread and chip in with some illustrations too. I have created the cover artwork and compiled one infographic page this time. 

The cover features Alby and Arby this time.

Click to enlarge.

Well, with this post comes the end of an era. From now onwards, there will be only freelance work for Brainwave that will go up here. So long readers. 

Brainwave. Issue 23. Big Bang

The new October Issue of Brainwave is about explosion, having a blast and making a big bang. This issue is done in a bit of hurry because of my Gujrat trip and then Design Yatra. The tight work schedule of putting a magazine together gets a bit unforgiving but at the same time it takes your thought process and idea generation skill a notch higher with each production deadline. This kind of work schedule has made me impatient with long projects but I just keep telling myself - Good things take time and my current project (details of which will follow soon in the month end blog post) is going to take a real good time. Getting back to the new issue, this one has a splash page, a comic strip and one spot illustration from me. I wish I could spend a lot more time with the splash page but one has to let go of things when the to-do-list is long. 

The illustration above has some hand drawn text embedded in it. If one can figure out what it is, then please do let me know. On a general consensus, I have failed to make it readable.