Debi

Here's one of the two comics I drew, coloured and designed for Grouppe Developpement (Sanjog) as a part of their attempt to raise awareness for the girl child in rural Bengal. This one's about a girl called Debi from a tiny village in Midnapore who is taken to Delhi to work as a household help. Things go wrong, she eventually escapes and, miraculously, finds her way back home. Sanjog is, I think, doing some fantastic work in terms of making media like this accessible to kids who'd find it difficult to visualise themselves as characters in a novel exemplifying bravery or empowerment.

Edit: All the pages are up! Sorry about the garishness, converting to jpeg brightened everything up into a thehorrorthehorror kind of situation. The printed version, I assure you, will not strike you blind. I also wish it weren't so text-heavy, but if all you get is ten pages on a tight budget with so much to say on such an important issue, suck it up. No regrets.

Also, they're now being translated into Kannada and Marathi in addition to the originally planned Hindi and Bangla editions. Hopefully I'll be drawing a few more of these in the months to come.

An exercise in rendering the obvious:

Mock book covers for our Macbeth project, which tried to look at the play as a modern-day whodunit with Macduff being called in by Malcolm to investigate Duncan's murder. It's narrated by Macduff's wife, who functions more or less as a Watson figure and remains unseen throughout. The end result was a Max Payne-ish ten-minute film composed of posterised photographs made to look like graphic novel panels. What a mishmash.

Here are some shots I took:

Taken with a Canon 450D then posterised and fiddled around with. We added comicbook-style captions and voiceovers. And when it was all done we went to Arsalan and ate mounds of biryani to celebrate. So all's good.

Messing around with some Van Gogh brushes that I found on dA.

This is from a Travel and Tourism poster I did back in school.




And this is from a menu card illustration.




Another tourism poster. I chose Kashmir. I love everything Kashmir.




Meditation and Healing.


Thought I'd put up some old stuff first.

Right. All of these were produced during end-of-term exams in school, back when I had Applied Art and Advertising sans Photoshop. Our hands were our tools, with stencils and paint and other stuff thrown in, and we were provided with the topic and the tagline, the rest was up to us. So yeah, everything apart from the actual illustration looked campy as hell. I miss these classes though, most of all I miss the poster paint. One of the reasons I like poster paint so much is because of the kind of opacity it provides - I can slather it on and swish it around and it still looks solid and comforting. I understand translucence and like it inasmuch as it makes things look transcendental and delicate, but posters should just be basic and colourful, I refuse to step off my soapbox in this case.

Everyone loves a sadhu, and I love this one I saw in Benaras, I remember him still because of the green beads and the flower in his hair.

Hello. Everyone does.

I'm not sure if this qualifies as a good start because I am now aware that Photoshop filters are plebeian and restrictive, not to mention entirely too straightforward ;)