Old School

A recent offer to illustrate a magazine article for a friend's submission allowed me to expand on my favourite black-and-white lineless Sin-City-ish style. The illustrations of nostalgic objects from architecture college life were too low-detail for only black and white, and I naturally rebelled against adding lines to increase the complexity. Rather than add another solid colour, I decided to add a pattern, preferably one with a relation to the object being illustrated. In keeping with the nostalgic feel, I also deliberately misaligned the fills by a small amount like the human error in old prints (telling you that was the main reason for this post).

Each image had a 'state change', sort of like a before/after image which would alternate with a mouseclick in the digital version. The other images are in this folder, along with other graphic artwork.

Neverendiwali

Just when I thought Diwali was behind me, I was given another art commission - designing and printing some ten-days-late Diwali cards - but this blog was not about only posting my 'artworks' [sic][k], so let's rush through the rigmarole of golden-spiral and diya-turning-into-parrot's-beak-into-feathers-into-stars-into-fireworks and the pretentious capitalisation of Concept and the customary image...

My first digital painting

... and get to some real stuff: the odd sentence "But I want to know beforehand if thought can live in those deserts" from Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus set me on my own tangent about the meaning of life. Realising I was an atheist was the first step to questioning what belief systems truly matter as a basis for living; more and more things seem meaningless and hollow upon inspection, and life feels like an unending desert. People around me find meaning in their work, their families, their passions, but each of these are the mirages they are creating for themselves to avoid the scary reality of walking in shifting dunes forever. Slowly, they become one of the trees in this fake oasis they have created and take root in the desert, surrounded by the illusion of meaning, and oblivious of the irony. The longer they stay, the deeper their roots go, until it is fatal to try to uproot them from this mirage - so it is with people and their beliefs about what truly matters.
The question is, what is the alternative? While I search the desert for answers that do not exist, I maintain some contact with other human beings through work and play, not to take root with them, but to surround myself with real trees. They offer no answers, but their shade is comforting.
How do I end a philosophical musing which I am still in the midst of living out?

LD50

Who'd have thought boredom and lack of beer would last this long - post number 50 is here, so whip out them firecrackers and let's parrrrr-take of some origami!

For Diwali, I was asked to make some boxes for sweets to be gifted - nothing large, purely a symbolic amount. Reviving some old origami interests, I looked for a box folding pattern, and found this easy one. 

After making the box, I realised the square base of the box (or lid, depending on which way it's oriented) could serve as the starting sheet for any other origami item. I decided the traditional crane was the most familiar fold I could do with the constraints of being surrounded by a larger square.

If you haven't kept up with trends in origami, origami is no longer shown in  step-by-step fashion like the previous links; instead, it's displayed as the opened-out pattern on the original square. Thus, the box and crane look like this respectively:

The dash-dotted and dashed lines are mountain and valley folds respectively - pretty basic origami notation for folds coming out at you or going in away from you.

By almost cutting out the square centre of the box, I could fit the (slightly modified) folding pattern of the crane as below:

Of course, this isn't how I folded it - I just made the cuts, folded the crane step-by-step, and then folded the box step-by-step - but let's stick to convention a bit. To my horror, when the lid is done, it isn't a square box any more, but a rhombus:

This would mean I would have to modify the base as well to fit inside the lid - gah!
On inspection of the original box fold, in order to distort the central square to a rhombus, one would effectively have to pull two opposite corners, and add and remove paper at the corners of compression and tension so that the opened-out pattern would sit flat. Deriving this wasn't as hard as I expected:

A purist would have derived it from a square, but I couldn't be bothered by folding away the extra bits of paper and adding to the thickness unnecessarily, so there you have it.
In order to give the box some stiffness and create a step between the lid and the base, I made two simple cardboard templates for insertion. The result:

Normal gift-wrapping paper was inexpensive, contextual and easy-to-fold; also, I could get it in the size I needed, which brings me to the sweets.
By coincidence, there is a rhombus shaped sweet (albeit a diamond instead of a lozenge) called a kaju katli that is both delicious and festive, and fit nicely into the box with a little space to insert greedy fingers, and 34 boxes later, I was DONE.

If you want to make your own box, here's the folding pattern, scaled to Ax paper size:

With a little work, you could figure out which part of the paper corresponds to different faces of the final box, and print out your own custom pattern along with the fold pattern.

If I had known one pitcher would last so long, I wouldn't have wasted a second.

Release the Painter

My first bit of work after quitting my office job was a mural on the terrace of a residence in Bangalore. The surface itself was a long wall (with a metal door) and a short portion of the wall adjacent to it. The only brief provided by the owner was that the subject had to be a 'Tree of Life' in the style of Gond tribal artwork. While the surface patterning had a lot of potential, I decided to pay as little attention to this brief as possible.

My insincere interests in fractals, golden rectangles and the Fibonacci series and their relation to nature compel me to insert them covertly in a lot of my artwork, without fully knowing why. Here, the tree itself was a victim to this layer of 'meaning', with its branches splitting in a Fibonacci series radially outwards from the corner between the two walls.

Using rules to generate natural forms; for the opposite, go here

Since a Tree of Life needed some lively elements, I added a bird for kicks (an Indian Roller, the state bird of Karnataka), positioned above the door so that when it was opened, the door would be a piece of art on its own. The walls were coloured in contrasting 'day/night' hues to highlight the change in direction.

Even the bird protested against this version

Since the client basically wanted a 'pretty picture' done in the Gond style, they were happy enough with this.

BUT

I'm greedy for meaning, depth and other pretentious things in my artwork. The proportions of the painting reminded me of Picasso's Guernica, and I felt I had to at least attempt to inject some similar political commentary, especially given the interesting events in India in May 2014. The incumbent Congress government seemed on its way out, though matriarch Sonia Gandhi was attempting to install her ineffectual son Rahul as the next Prime Minister. Meanwhile, the Opposition BJP party's strongman Narendra Modi was seemingly winning the electoral campaign single-handedly. In the midst of this, anti-corruption activist and blink-and-miss Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal added to the chaos with his Aam Aadmi Party.

The reworked mural design contained not only this storyline, but also seemed vastly improved in terms of composition.

I couldn't think of a good portmanteau for bird- and election-related words here

Though the owners know nothing of this, here are some notes, for the sake of my ego, which cannot keep a secret:

• Mr.Modi's authoritarian style of government, coupled with a bloody riot in his state during his Chief Ministership 12 years earlier, had led to critics labelling him as 'Hitlerian'; nevertheless, he seemed to be having the last laugh and his day in the sun. I incorporated both of these in the design for the rooster at the left (note the strutting swastika inspired body structure).
• The Congress mother-and-son duo formed the peahen and the peacock towards the centre; the egg-like form of the peacock referring to the popular perception of Mr.Gandhi being unable to fight his own political batttles.
• Mr.Kejriwal's owl sits silently in the night, chastened after his perceived electoral blunder of stepping down from his chief-ministership a few months earlier. His night-watchmanlike vigilance in exposing other parties' corruption was still powerful enough to consider him a contender in the elections.

The final stroke of paint was applied three weeks later, and here's the result:

The leaves and branch on the door were left black to separate it from the wall

 

 Each party's political symbol is hidden in the bird's plumage

I decided against painting the switchboard

For those who came in late: Mr. Modi's party won the election; he entered office as Prime Minster of India on 26 May, 2014.

La'dakh Knight

This isn't a travel blog. I write here when I'm bored and there's no beer. 
Nevertheless, I tend to travel to desolate places, and write about them on this blog. Leh is the latest on this list, with pretty much every type of landscape except a beach; even kicking your camera away in disgust would result in a great shot. I don't intend to bother anyone but my nears'n'dears with photos, but you can have a looksie at a sketch I did: 

Leh Palace and Namgyal Tsemo Gompa in feel-good 4:3 format

As always, shooting my creative self in the foot found me with near-dry pens and cheap A4 paper, but I persevered nonetheless. I'm happier making little Frank Miller Sin City-like black and white compositions at the cost of recognisability, than a Hergé-esque ligne claire (which is what they look like initially). Two hours was about all I could spare, so that sketch better suffice, at least until the next arid destination.

Along with an unassisted pony ride up a rocky terrain, midnight rafting, and pitching a tent on the banks of a lake, partial credit for entertainment goes to the Border Roads Organisation and their witty road signs; one of them even inspired a t-shirt I got custom embroidered (this is possible):

Yes, 'RELLY'

On the way back, we discovered that we had only one of the two playing card packs we had carried, and the cards were mixed. To make a full pack, I got a little creative, if only to keep our sanity on a 36-hour train journey:

I found it impossible to keep a straight face with a drag-queen of hearts in my hand

If you like reposting images, please tell people I drew them. Not just these ones, I'd like to take credit for everything, I'm a harmless megalomaniac.

Transexualarm

Since I don't want to sound like a complete offence-bomb (because I'm not - I think), I decided against presenting this idea like a spoof Indian Railways advert, and am just going straight-shooter:

If you're male and have travelled in a non-AC compartment of the Indian Railways train service, you may have encountered a transexual (my spelling; derogatorily called hijra) asking you for money, supposedly in return for blessings. Being a rationalist, I don't really give a dime for any sort of blessings, and I equate the act with the same disgrace of begging. But transexuals in India face discrimination also because of their identity and associated superstitions; members of the community attempting to integrate into society face harsh discrimination and many obstacles. 

An otherwise eccentric faculty member from my college told us that if you have a problem, look for another problem to cancel it out. While it sounds like wishful thinking, I have noticed many times after that this is true (sadly, still often in retrospect). I noticed two problems here - passengers in trains getting harassed by transexuals trying to make a living, and the difficulty of waking up at unearthly hours like 5 a.m. to get off at the right station. If you've noticed the Indian Railways ticket booking website, there's a small check-box for considering for 'Auto-upgradation'* of your berth to a higher 'class'. This seems like a fanciful dream they're feeding us, with not enough benefit to enough passengers** to justify taking up so much screen real estate. I've replaced that area with a 'Transexualarm' booking option: 

Here's a blow-up of the option:

Dare I say copyright?

Some of the 'options' may seem a little frivolous, but like I said, I had originally planned a spoof splash page, with a line-for-line replacement of the 'Auto-upgradation' option.

I see a couple of additional advantages here, apart from providing the members of this community with legitimate income, and passengers with a reliable wake-up call:

1. The service providers do not need to uproot themselves from their 'base of operations' and can operate in local unions employed by the Indian Railways, with some benefits.
2. This will encourage a more healthy professional interaction between members of the community and passengers, serving to dispel wrong notions held by society about transexuals, and encouraging acceptance and comfort.

I couldn't have made it less offensive than that.

*  Yuck, two 'for's in a row

** Yuck, two 'enough's in a row

Comic Stripper 05 - Monkeying Around

A comic competition on creating sanitation awareness in developing countries led to this:

Monkey 'Business'

The Breakdown:

• The brief required breaking the taboo on talking about, well, SHIT. I was quite pleased with the just-about-but-not-too-subtle dialogue, though I didn't find it funny - ah well. Each monkey's line has something to do with their role, but now I'm just spoon-feeding.
• The conscious choice to work in black and white (and grey!) led me to choose the langur as my model of choice for the monkeys. The black extremities and face made it easy to get away with zero lines, with just a few extra shadow fills to define the body and limbs.
• I continue to worry about symmetry in composition; as with my first competition entry four years ago (in 2010), the speech bubble, if it can't be avoided, must play a visual part in addition to its communicative role. In this case, it pretty much carries the joke.

While the fly was added last minute to make the mute monkey's 'stench bubble' more obvious, in hindsight I would have placed the fly inside rather than hovering nearby. This would have provided the added option of interpreting the third monkey as making a buzzing noise in disgust, similar to the visual gag of a snoring person with a sawing log image in their speech bubble.

The Closest I Can Get

In my last weeks of work, I was asked to help design another clubhouse, because of my experience in working on clubhouse detailing for the past TWO YEARS.
One of the components is a 'leisure pool', the kind you see fat people flopping about in, because swimming is for fools ("No wait, pools are for swimming, not vice versa";"I said 'fools', not pools"; "Oh"). 
As opposed to a lap pool, it is supposed to be curvy and 'organic'. In such situations, architects generally take design cues from a strong concept, or criteria such as views, privacy and access. I just decided to be inspired by 'Nature':

Fig 01: Site Plan - The pool had to fit in the long space north of the building

Fig 02: Ex-Miss Universe Sushmita Sen decides to drop by

Fig 03: I trace around her body, breaking out into a sweat in office

Fig 04: She leaves, with only a ghostly outline as evidence (was it just a dream?)

Fig 05: I 'rationalize' the curves

Fig 06: Leisure pool complete!

To the right of the leisure pool would come the straighter, less organic lap pool. Wait, did I just say 'lap'?

Updates are always a pain, unless they're like this:

@onepitcher And you have me smiling!!! :)) quite the architect!! Interesting design!! :)) cheers!
— sushmita sen (@thesushmitasen) April 3, 2014

The Cursed

They sat apart, disgusted with the rest of the world that they looked down upon from their enlightened perch. They sat, because they saw nothing to stand for, nothing worth committing themselves to, except their own ideals, which had no use but to judge the world with.

While they sat, the world moved on, unmindful, precisely because it had no mind. They were aware of this, there was no way they couldn't be, and it was possible that this was at least partly the source of their disgust. There seemed to be no way of saving them, in fact, it was quite obvious they didn't consider themselves in need of saving, and perhaps they were right. There was no knowing, either way. It was much easier to let them be, however pathetic they might seem.

They were immortal, in that their rejection of this age and any other lent them a sort of detachment from time itself. They had no beginning worth tying themselves to, and no end worth fearing. Looking down at the oatmeal-coloured history of the world, they believed that they could see the distinct lack of pattern that everybody else had been content to wade in all their lives.

But they were also acutely conscious of their mortality in the more mundane sense of the word; their dialogue betrayed a sense of loneliness and acceptance of a fate quite terrible. The shared space they found themselves in gave them no sense of camaraderie, each sitting enamoured in a mirrored dome, and seeing only the desert with themselves in it.

Nothing surprised them any more, at least not since they realised that they knew everything - what they did not know must have simply not been worth remembering. The laughter and tears that seemed to make up the lives of those around them was met with scorn, although they could not be sure themselves if yearning was not mixed with it.

In this plane, courage had no place - the apparent sameness of all options removed the possibility of violent upheaval and the need to face or flee it. Looking at meaninglessness in the face required only the inability to feel despair, which came naturally to them.

In these circumstances, there was only one way to react - so they laughed. The world moved on, unmindful.