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. 

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. 

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. 

Brainwave. Issue 22. Windy World

While putting the title up for this post I realised that I started blogging about Brainwave from Issue 7. It has been 15 issues old on my blog. Looking back at the past issues, I can see I have grown a lot working with each issue. But every time I have to sit with the work for new issue, it's a struggle to not do what has been done before. 
This issue has only three of my artworks and each done in different style. I have used digital, pencils and inks respectively for the three artworks. I have been trying to integrate type where ever I can in my artworks and the splash page works with that intention. 

Brainwave. Issue 21. Gene Pool

The new Brainwave issue is about genetics and unlike the last issue on movies, this one was put together after some brain wracking efforts by the writers and editors. I worked mostly on the articles out of the cover story except the splash page. Lately, I have been enjoying working with digital illustrations using simple shapes and textures. In this issue I ended up using this style quite a bit and I am slowly getting efficient with it too. I guess it's the poster making which is helping me in getting fluent with this style. Here are the illustrations I worked on - 

Splash Page - The DNA structure has been treated as a roller coaster with proteins riding on it.

Illustration for an article about a vending machine that gives a can of ice tea for free in exchange of a tweet. The idea for this artwork is based on the myth about stork delivering babies.

In London, Vodafone has sponsored red coloured umbrellas that harvest solar energy and save it for you to charge your cell phones on the go. The extended antenna on top also helps in increasing the network strength of your phone.

Artwork for a research done on Dung Beetles and what exactly is their choice when it comes to animal poop. 

Did you know that a candle's flame is round in shape and blue in colour if lit in a spaceship? You also will have to keep blowing at the flame after every few minutes to stop it from going off. 

Brainwave. Issue 20. Movie Magic

I remember very clearly how ET was like a dream come true for me as a kid. The VHS of that movie played very often for the time it was rented. The iconic scene of bicycle flying in the backdrop of a giant silhouette of moon is ingrained in my memory. I am sure like me many will have similar memories of particular movies that spun the magical web for them. Being a kid of late eighties, movies with visual effects was still growing and being fed on a very selective few was like being drenched in good rain after a long dry spell.

In this issue of Brainwave, we have looked back at some of the milestones of visual effects usage in movies and the pioneers who worked around with creative ideas and technology to make the audience jump out of their seats leaving them in an awe holding on to their 3D glasses. This issue covers the theme through timeline, 'Top Ten' monsters, 'Here's How' sections and talking about a few highlighted movies. This structure came as a bit of strain because it required plenty of artworks and then putting it all together as one cover story. But we managed pretty well as a team. Here are my artworks for this issue.

Splash Page for cover story

Top Ten Monsters 

Godzilla

Hulk

The Mummy

Highlighted Movies

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Star Wars episode 4: A new hope

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers  

Tron

A preview spread. 

King Kong, illustrated by Vinayak Varma and Avatar, illustrated by Anuranjini Singh.

I believe this issue is worth preserving for the future generations. I have my two copies well stacked in. 

I just got back to Bangalore after a short holiday from home. Finally, the work on my graphic novel has started again. One frame a day is what I am aiming for now. Hoping to take it ahead from there.

Factoons. Brainwave. 13th June

Ever wondered why the process of recording on a disc is referred to as burning? The information on a disc is recorded in digital form, represented by a series of 1s and 0s. A disc has a thin reflective metal sheet with a translucent dye layered on top. The CD burner is equipped with a powerful 'write laser' that burns the translucent dye to make it opaque. The parts which are opaque block the light from reflecting off the metal sheet, giving it a digital value of 0, and the parts which are left translucent get a value of 1. This is how data is burnt on a CD!

Brainwave. Issue 19. Paleo Planet

Although this issue came to the stands before the first week of June but the blog update of it got delayed due to the production week for the July Issue. The work has been running tight and it the middle of all the last minute chaos I ended up doing the cover for the June issue along with the layouts and spot illustrations for inside pages. The theme for it is crocodiles, dinosaurs and birds and the cover turned out to be alright for a last minute job. But, before everything else, here's a comic strip on why a few dinosaurs have been upset with what the paleontologist did to them.

Right-click on the image and select 'open link in new tab' for larger view.

Here are a couple of spot illustrations for an article done on Gustave, one of the largest crocodile alive right now. His size and voracious appetite has given him a cult status in the neighbouring areas of Burundi. 

 

And lastly, here's the cover.

The next issue is about visual effects used in movies. So gear up with 3D glasses, modelling clay, flip-books and persistence of vision. The kids of 80's and 90's are going to have a good time.

Factoons. Brainwave. 6th june

A walnut is tough to crack but just because it's hard-shelled doesn't mean it's a nut. In reality, walnuts are classified as drupes! Fruits that have a fleshy covering over a hard shell surrounding the seed, are called drupes like coffee, mangoes and coconuts. Dry fruit that just have a hard shell covering a seed inside are true nuts, like hazelnuts, chestnuts and acorns.

Brainwave. Factoons. 30th May

Leeches are blood-sucking worms, whose mouths work as suction pumps to draw blood out without causing any pain to the host because of the anesthetic in their saliva. One of the easy ways to get rid of them is to put some salt on their body. The salt draws all the water from inside the leech's body leaving it dehydrated. Although, you shouldn't put salt on leeches when they are attached to your skin. It can make them vomit back into the wound which can become infected.

Brainwave. Factoons. 23rd May

A 'byte' is the unit to measure digital information, like hard drive memory, file size, etc. Before there were pen drives and CDs, we stored and transferred data using floppy disks (which had a humble capacity of 1.44mb). We sure have come a long way from there. In fact, when Intel co-founder Gordon Moore noticed in 1965 that the capacity of the circuits had been doubling every two years since it had been invented, he predicted that the same trend would continue in the future. It looks like Moore's Law holds true even today.

Factoons. Brainwave.16th May

Here's the new factoon for this Wednesday. 
In its basic form, rubber has few uses. But depending on what chemicals are added to it, we can make rubber flexible (like rubber bands) or strong (like tyres), and create several things with interesting properties.

Factoons. Brainwave. 9th May.

I have started doing a Science cartoon every Wednesday for the Brainwave facebook page. This one is about Carbon Dating. You can visit the facebook page here - Brainwave
Here's the description for this Factoon - Any living being gathers a fixed ratio of Carbon12 and Carbon14 during its lifetime. Once dead, it begins to lose the Carbon14 stored within its body while the Carbon12 amount stays the same. The difference in the ratio of Carbon12 and depleted Carbon14 helps scientists measure the fossil's age. 

Brainwave. Issue 18. Moving Around

The latest issue of Brainwave is on the wheels, literally. I spent a lot of time doing the splash page for this issue trying to mix illustration with typography. Although the style looks fairly quick-to-do in its nature but it's quite deceiving. Took me some time to finish it off. The Tour De France illustration is inspired from the artworks of Malcolm Farley. 

A spread on Tour De France

A spread on history of racing.

I just finished reading a compilation of Best American Comics 2007 put together by Chris Ware and it has given me all the more reason to step away from overtly decorative artworks for a while. To name a few of the inspiring artists - Anders Nilsen, Dan Zettwoch and Seth. I think I am going to try some minimal illustrations in coming issues.

Brainwave. Issue 17. All Fools

The month of fools has come and Brainwave has rewarded all of them with their new issue on Pseudoscience. If you think stars really pull your luck around then this issue would be a helpful read to you. No matter how bogus our beliefs are but a drop of scientific reasoning always does us good, like not eating during solar eclipse because the atmosphere is full of negative energy. In short, since you can't cook a fine dish with measured cups of water then why not half cook it with some holy water. 
With this issue, I tried using the learning from Typoday to make the layout more accommodating for the users (editors and copywriters) and weaving the whole magazine around the pixel look. Any magazine should maintain a common feel across it pages but in kid's magazine you can play that role on a very low level so that it doesn't render the pages as unexciting for the young eyes. Since I worked closely on the design and typesetting part of the magazine, I chose to do only a few illustrations this time. I am glad I didn't illustrate much otherwise my itch towards the blind believers would have led the magazine to a few lawsuits.
Here are my contributions for this issue and no lies, you can see the Robert Crumb influence bleeding out  -

Splash page artwork process and options.

Final artwork for the splash page.

Spot illustration for the 'Smarties' story.

Basava Premanand, the Guru Buster

A small comic strip on how to try the levitation trick.

Spot illustration for an article on 'Intelligent Design'.