Tag: card

A Long Time Ago…

An Assortment Of Beautiful Paper

Once upon a time, little children made greeting cards using many things – the chief ingredient was, however, called paper. Many children enjoyed it, but some didn’t. So they employed adults to make them, or went to the marketplace.

Then one day, something called the ‘Internet’, entered the kingdom. It didn’t like what it saw, and started its quest to find an alternative. It made friends – lots of friends. It was knowledgeable, and paid regular visits to everyone. It became very popular, and eventually conquered the kingdom of ‘Human Race’.

Under the new rule, greeting cards lost favour with the peasants. Many children, adults, and trees were happy with this, and they all are trying to live happily ever after…

* * *

I was rummaging through a shelf, looking for a piece of cardboard. It was the bottommost shelf – home to a lifetime of scrap paper, greeting cards, fancy and colourful invitations.

Since childhood, paper has fascinated me. That bottom shelf, is my treasure – the different colours, and textures, some glossy and many handmade. While most were addressed to us, there were a few which were given to me because I loved collecting them.

As children, we made our own cards, and gladly received those made by our friends. By the time we left school, the concept of anything hand-made, was all but dead. Even though I would have loved to make a card, I feared, that it would be misconstrued as a miserly act. So we occasionally bought cards.

With the advent of the internet, and increasing emphasis on saving trees, cards have become electronic. And why not – it saves trees, and a lot of space in our cupboard!

After finding what I was looking for, I began shoving everything back inside, when a few cards caught my eye. A beautiful batik card, which was mailed to us by relatives, and a hand-made card. Both beautiful in their own ways.

I unfolded the hand made one. In a world ruled by everything electronic, my friend had taken out the time to make something for me. It was the last hand-made card I received, and perhaps the one I will treasure the most…

Tags card, greeting card, hand made, paper, paper greeting cards

Hobbies

Happy Deepavali!

Happy Deepavali

Another Deepavali (Diwali), another card! Also, a poster I made exactly a year ago… but forgot about!

I got the background wooden texture from here.
The lamp in the card is actually a sketch I made recently (after a break of 10 months, I finally picked up the pencil). I hope to post the sketch soon.

No Crackers — Celebrate a cracker-free Diwali

This is a poster I made last year. The background image (which I really liked so much, I just threw in a bunch of words to make it a poster) is by Anshu. I’d forgotten about it when I was uploading to the gallery (and it wasn’t very original either). This time around, I decided to upload it.

Wishing everyone a very Happy and Cracker-free Diwali 🙂
Cheers!

Tags card, deepavali, diwali, festival, India, sketch

Hobbies

Festival Season!

Diwali Greeting Card 2010

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a post… Thanks to some work… Hope to write about the experience soon, for now, here’s a greeting for the upcoming Festival Season

Its been a long time since I’ve paid a visit to the blog. In fact its been a long time since I’ve paid a visit to anybody over the past few months.

It’s the annual competition season and the Creative Minds Competition is around the corner. As usual everything had to be done at the very last moment and as the deadline for sending entries drew nearer, everything took a back seat.

When I say, everything, I mean everything including food and sleep! For the last week we slept a little more than a few hours and food refused to go down out throats as tension and pressure reached its peak. Looking back, I’m struggling to recall all that happened – everything seems blurry.

This project involved two people – myself and my friend Atul. In a way it was a shared dream. We took up the project more as a challenge to ourselves, to stretch ourselves, and to find out how much we could do. At first, we felt it was a small project, and the two of us would be enough. But as things started shaping up, the magnitude of our work multiplied. After initial reluctance, even we realised we needed at least one more person for the job.

Both of us knew who we wanted on the team, but as luck would have it, she was busy. We asked our mentor if there would be anyone who could do the job. Even we tried to look for that elusive third person, but in vain. Finally we decided that the two of us were enough. Everyone around us had doubts about our capability to pull off the project, perhaps even we had our fair share of doubts.

But we had to finish the project. After all, it was our idea, and now that it was out of the bag, we couldn’t let some one else pick it up. And above everything else, it was our reputation on the line. Last year, I had the misfortune of being a part of 2 projects of a similar scale. One that got completed, and one that didn’t. The one that was completed fell short of expectations (and I fervently thank my stars I didn’t play much of a part in it). The one in which I was involved more actively, couldn’t be completed. To be honest, no one could be blamed for the fiasco. The time period allotted for both the projects was simply too short.

We couldn’t afford to repeat last year’s mistakes.

Our deadline was the 30th of September, and somehow, we scraped out something. Its all over (at least officially), and it has been a very adventurous journey, filled with ups and downs, and last minute patches. I do not know when we started it (not the precise date anyway) but we had a rough storyline in the third week of June (my email puts it to 19 June).

Over the past 3 months we have learnt a lot. In many ways it was a crash course in project management, as well as time management. We realised how much effort professionals have to put in to produce quality results. As a lay person, it is easy to criticise what we see, but it is only when we try to achieve the same, we begin to appreciate what it takes to be there, and do it. At a student level, theoretically things seem simple and logical. But when it comes to doing things, especially with a deadline at hand, it is an entirely different ball game.

As I mentioned before, we managed to complete the project. But honestly, it was way below what we had expected. Perhaps we bit off more than we could chew, perhaps it was because it was our first attempt, perhaps we were one person short, maybe it was the lack of time, or perhaps a salad of everything, with a pinch of technical glitches (not according to taste)!

So after all that’s said and done, we’ve mutually decided not to share our adventure till we can safely make it public without embarrassment. Now that there is no deadline hanging over us, it is hard to tell when that time will come, but I sure hope its sooner rather than later.

For now, we’re enjoying a little break (spent the past 2 days sleeping :P)

Since the festival season has already begun, I decided to share something I made last year. It is a Diwali card I made for display. I had presented it to our mentor but Atul managed to pull out a photograph he took of it. So here it is…

Happy Navratri and Happy Diwali in advance 🙂

Cheers!!

Tags card, deepavali, diwali, India, project, sketch, work pressure

Hobbies

Belated happy Holi!

Holi hai! (It's Holi!)

Last week my brother asked me to make an e-card, if it can be called one, for the festival of Holi. He told me he wanted a splash of colours and gave a small reference image to work with. I wasn’t quite sure how to go about it, so I took a short cut! I downloaded a few paint spatter brushes and applied them randomly, and viola! It was done!
Now since the bulk of the work was done using brushes, it’s only fair that I should give credit to the sources of the brushes. There’s one called Bombay_Wisps and one that’s called benblogged(splatter). So a big thank you to them for putting out stuff so that other’s can use them :).

On my brother’s suggestion, I decided to upload it here. I admit, its late. But anyway, here’s wishing everyone a great Holi 🙂