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Happy Harvesting!
Tag: sketch
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The Good, Bad, and the Incomplete!
One Confession
This year has been quite a roller coaster. A year filled with lots of firsts. I attempted the Weekly Photo Challenges, Writing Challenges, and even the Daily Prompts. Truth be told, I got lucky with some of the topics. Perhaps some one at The Daily Post sneaked in to my head, and posted appropriate challenges (including this one)!!
The Broken Tree
Bird – Attempted Madhubani Style
Two Realisations
At the end of the previous year, I had one follower. (I’m not counting my friends and family members – who were forced to visit my blog after my constant nagging). This year, I have discovered, and learnt a lot from other bloggers. Thanks to the aforementioned lucky coincidences, I have more readers, and I kick myself for not participating in challenges often.
I cannot have my cake and it too. While I love to participate in all the challenges, and I do have things to say, real life also needs priority – hence, my posts will always come at irregular intervals.
Three unfinished works
I have two sketches, and an acrylic painting that are waiting for me to complete them. I am not including the sketch from last year, and the oil painting I started many many years ago! I would have shown them to you, but I’m just too lazy to photograph them. Also, the painting is in the art room of my institute, and I’m too cowardly to face my teacher (whom I am sure I have disappointed with this one).
Four projects
This year has been one in which I have little to show – At least not as much as I would have wished. Blogging has, to a certain extent, distracted me from my studies, and at the same time, has encouraged me to create something, with the sole intention of posting it here.
Happy Deepavali!
Tada! And the destruction is complete!
I learnt a lot this year, especially about 3D animation, and spent a major part of the year on two projects – a character, which I built from scratch, and a short film, in which I rigged a character, and oversaw other member’s work. These are quite amateurish, and hence I haven’t posted much about them. The sheer effort involved in creating a 60 second 3D animated clip, was overwhelming. I can only wonder what magic must be required to produced full length feature films in this medium.
Close Up
The Gift
My best creation to date, and one I hold close to my heart is ‘Mr Paper’. It was made in the early part of the year, and has made me a bit of a celebrity 😀
And finally, dear reader, if you found most of this article vague and has left you confused, it is probably because I am currently working on my fourth project – capping one of the busiest years of my life.
Many Memories
I’ll leave you with a small collage of stills – which visually represent what I have been up to this year – the things I’ve made, the places that I have seen… Here’s wishing the entire blogging community a very happy and prosperous New Year.
Label for the Chocolate Box
Threads ‘n’ Weaves mailer page 1
The Brooch
Mizoram Bamboo Dance
Pencil on Sketchbook
Contemplating
Houses Adjoining The Graves
Papyres Poster
Pigeons in flight
From Grandfather, With Love
A Sketch Of Our Pot Of Coffee
Pencil on Sketchbook
Charcoal Pencil Sketch
This coming week, India celebrates Karthik Poornima. The peacock is Lord Karthikeya’s vaahana (vehicle).
According to Wikipedia:
Karthik Poornima (Karthik purnima) is a Hindu holy day celebrated on the full moon day of the lunar month Karthik (November–December). It is also known as Tripuri poornima and Tripurari Poornima. It is sometimes called Deva-Diwali or Deva-Deepawali – the festival of lights of the gods. The Karthik Purnima festival also coincides with the Sikh festival of Guru Nanak Jayanti.
Karthik poornima is also the birthday of Matsya, god Vishnu’s fish-incarnation (Avatar). It is also the birthday of Vrinda, the personification of the Tulsi plant and of Kartikeya, the god of war and son of Lord Shiva. This day also is considered dear to Radha, the lover of Krishna – Vishnu’s incarnation. It is believed that Krishna and Radha danced rasa and Krishna worshipped Radha on this day.
A tribute to a tree
It was the final year of school, and like any other school-going child, I was expected to bury my head in my books.
To facilitate this task, I had been given a little space, all to myself. One small corner, cut off from the whole house. There was room only for a small table, and chair. If I pushed my chair a little away from the table, I would hit the back wall. To my left, was the bedroom, which could be completely hidden from view, by a curtain.
All I had to do, was draw the curtain, and I would have nothing to disturb me from studying – except of course, the view from the windows. The front and the side walls had huge windows, providing a clear and beautiful view of Silk Cotton and Neem Trees, interspersed with Bougainvillea. A street lamp was the lone indicator, that I was in the middle of an urban city.
The birds on the trees would cheer me up when I was studying management functions, and the trees would silently watch over my shoulder, as I concentrated on accounts.
Amidst all the greenery, in the distance, one tree stood out like a sore thumb. It was barren, and its top-most branch was broken. It had always been like that, and showed no signs of changing any time soon. Occasionally, a large bird – possibly a kite – sat on its branches.
Every time I looked out of the side window, my gaze fell straight on that tree. Even though it was leafless, it looked strong, and I took a liking to it.
I tried, on several occasions, to try to locate the tree on the ground. But it was visible only through the window.
In spring, the Silk Cotton and Bougainvillea painted a colourful painting. When the storm came, leaves and branches of the Neem Tree shook violently. The rains made all the trees grow taller, and greener. But the broken tree stood as still as stone.
I had finished my school, and was well into my graduation. My ‘study table’ was now the ironing table. Days turned into months, and months into years. I kept returning to the window to look at that tree. It was there, standing resolutely, even as the wind brought drastic changes in its surroundings.
The broken tree did not change at all. The trees in its vicinity kept growing, slowly, and steadily. Until one day, the tree was completely out of view.
Once the tree was out of view, I stopped looking out those windows.
Recently, a shopping complex was built nearby. The distant trees are all gone, and only the Neem and Silk Cotton Trees are left. I haven’t seen the broken tree since. And it is unlikely that I ever will.
Although it was meant to be a photo challenge, this week’s theme inspired me to write, and draw…
Weekly Photo Challenge : Silhouette
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Flaming Flowers!
A few posts back I had written about spring and flowers. I had sketched out a hibiscus bud a few months back, and this month I drew the ‘loudspeaker lily’.
I folded a ‘half-imperial’ sized sheet and drew these on each half. They’re approximately 24 cm in width and 33 cm in height.
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The friends I made during the year
The last few hours of the year are here, and I find myself sitting alone… In search for company, I decided to rummage through some of the things I’ve been up to over the past few months… The end of yet another year… Here’s wishing everyone a great year ahead… better than the year gone by…
In the beginning of the year, my brother had the opportunity to visit Sikkim, a small state in the Himalayas. Among the many souvenirs he brought back were lucky charms (I’m assuming they have something to do with feng shui, but I really can’t say for sure). Here’s one that posed for me on the table…
The table is always a work-in-progress. Sometimes its squeaky clean, but mostly, its got some odd objects visiting it. While I was looking around the rather cluttered table, I noticed this pendent… My mother and I purchased it from a street seller on an impulse. It’s one of my favourites… and we bought it really really cheap…
Looking for a familiar face in the sketching file, I found this photograph of a really old sketch… The first of many seashells… It’s perhaps been the best too…
There’s something about sea shells that never ceases to fascinate me. The different shapes, sizes, colours, textures, designs and patterns. And the strangest thing is, that the creature that makes these magnificent works of art, is a slimy creature which no one would want.
This is the latest seashell that was gracious enough to pose for me (also a key chain). I kind of got fed up with the chains. I assumed the shell too would want to be free for a while. So I unchained it and allowed it to rest on a velvet blanket. I hope it felt good.
Talking of feeling good, the doctor told me to catch some sun…
and what better way to catch the sun, than with a few flowers.
So I put on a pair of shoes, caught the train, and paid a visit to some flowers…
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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.
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!
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Festival Season!
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!!
Categories
Sketch editing
During one of our still life sessions, we were told to make a flower vase, with flowers in it of course! Nature, and anything to do with plants is a very exciting prospect for me. I’ve often joked that I have no interest in humans 😛
So I began, and had a good start. But then it all went horribly wrong. The backdrop was a sheet of tarpaulin, and I really messed it up. I was a little sad, because some of the flowers had come out pretty decent. But the leaves and the background really let it down.
So here’s where the software came to the rescue. Initially I thought I would paint it digitally, with the sketch as the base. It was a rather tedious process. It took me a hell of a long time to do it, and with other work piling up, I sort of abandoned it. Then, when the time came to get my portfolio up and running and post stuff on the blog, I got back to the file. It was then that it dawned on me that I needn’t waste so much time! While a clean painting would look nice, I simply did not have the time, or the motivation to complete it.
This sketch was completed on 1st November 2009. So it was already stale. So I used some short-cuts and just adjusted the colours using standard colour-correction tools and presto! The ugly background had disappeared! 🙂
So while this sketch is not part of my gallery, I think it is pretty decent enough to have its own post 🙂
A couple of years back, I joined sketching classes. The classes included study of still life, perspective as well as the study of human anatomy. But I kind of got stuck at still life!
There is something about putting pencil to paper, and just looking at an inanimate object. Its just sitting there, patiently waiting for you to make its portrait. It doesn’t feel conscious of your presence, it doesn’t move about, and it definitely does not need breaks.
Like I mentioned earlier, every sketch has a story behind it. Here’s one of them:
Our sketching batch was wound up within a couple of months and our faculty member had told us to continue sketching and show him our work. But, as it turned out, I had stopped doing anything. As the months rolled, I began getting negative thoughts. I was sad most of the time and maybe I was on the verge of depression. I felt like I had nothing to do, a feeling of utter uselessness. I remember crying miserably on my mother’s shoulder and telling her how I felt.
She somehow consoled me, and although my tears had dried up, I was still sad. So, out of sheer desperation, I picked up my sketchbook, emptied a little ‘kullad’ (a small earthen pot) and began drawing. It was late at night and everyone had gone off to sleep. I stayed up till midnight and completed the sketch.
The very next day, I attempted to sketch a rare, odd-looking seashell right next to the mud pot. Soon I felt my self belief returning.
My mother remarked that the sketch looked sad. But I will always respect it. It’s not the best, but it is the sketch that saved my confidence.
Musings of an eccentric mind 