Creative Gaga - Mar/Apr_2011 (Preview)

creative

Exhibit GagaWorthy `200/www.CreativeGaga.com

VOL1/ ISSUE2

March/April 2011 the enthusiastic creative journal

Simpu’s story as told by

Vaibhav Kumaresh

Sudhir Tailang

and his art of cartooning

COVEnRal

Seaso e Lov r e

by Sah Imran

Aamina Shazi’s

techniques of digital art creativegaga.com

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Contents

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Tigress. Break-through. The rise of silent confidence amongst Indian women and a metaphoric breaking of a woman’s shackles.

Exhibit

08 TrendFeed

Inspiring design with potential to be influential.

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News Feed

Just concluded design events.

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Readers Bite

From the desk of our readers.

16 SpendThrift

Thoughtfully designed stuff that you can acquire.

Figures

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Happy Strokes/ Harikrishnan Panicker

33 Simpu. Channel V Simpu Singh

He reveals how he pours a happy heart into his art.

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Bohemian Fantasies/ Harshvardhan Kadam

For him, travelling is a method to create visual stories.

Brush with Fame

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The winning entry by Saher Imran.

Simpu Saga/Vaibhav Kumaresh

Podium

The animator-director talks about depicting stories through movement.

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42 Fodder Scam.

Unforgettable Alphabet/ Aksharaya Workshop

Inspiration Studio/Sameer Kulavoor

Bombay Duck Design looks around itself to create quirky urban art.

Designers from acroos the country brought words to life.

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Dissident Design/Sudhir Tailang

Handmade Revolution/ The People’s Project

The veteran cartoonist on how his lines transform into an art of opposition.

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Hamari Dukaan brings a new ray of hope to the traditional art and crafts of India.

Design Institution/Opinion

Top designers of the country discuss the problems in Indian design education and the way out.

Gyaan

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Fantasy Trip/Aamina Shazi

She explains the making of her digital painting-Journey.

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Identity Matters/Prasun Mazumdar

The process behind creating the logo for an NGO by the brand identity specialist.

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Talking Mouse/Rupinder Singh

10 Colours of India.

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Appetiser Appeal/Shirish Sen

The renowned food photographer gives away insights to better clicks.

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Text Art/Syed Naqib Ahmed

The process of breathing life into text by the digital designer.

The young digital artist designs with the purpose of communicating social messages.

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Writing by Design/Omkar Sane

Exploring the vibrant and visual style of the author.

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Art Adept/Aditi Sood

She shows clear expertise with various design mediums.

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Figures EarlyRiser

Creativity is like a flame that needs air around. For Hari, his dad was his inspiration. He used to love designing and building furniture and interiors, including their house. Soon Hari picked up on the creativity and was drawing on shoes, t-shirts and toys, which were different in appeal and stood out from the rest with their wackiness. Hari learnt early that creativity couldn’t be taught. It is a trait, he says, that is naturally inculcated and if present, needs a certain period of time to get discovered. The internal and external environments are at constant play during the initial years to facilitate the expression of it. Hence, childhood is when designers usually discover their disposition.

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Design is about being selfless. With a diverse audience with varying levels of cultural background, sensibilities and comprehension, it’s a challenge to stick to basal elements to achieve universality.

Happiness is an emotion everyone strives for. Hari observes, it serves as a rejuvenating experience in the monotonous life of today. He believes his works serve as a stress-buster.

Simplicity is attraction without distraction. Words like fun, life and youth stimulate imagery that is full of various elements, symbols and colours. However, a mature design is one that is simple yet strong. As a designer, you learn with time that too many elements only diffuse the central idea and reduce the impact.

Employing the minimalistic approach in terms of color, type and form enables you to focus on the main message which forms the crux of your design >

01 Beyond Music.

Beyond Television.

A space-themed office wall graphic designed to accommodate MTV’s new tagline.

02 Red Space Bike.

Highly imaginative hand-pulled silk screen posters.

03 VH1 3-year celebration artwork.

A dynamic unit created to suit the brand image.

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04 Green Rainbow. Shoes designed for his wife. She loves rainbows and his favorite color is green.

06 Thumbdemon Visiting Card. Card used as a canvas initially when a branding didn’t exist.

05 Woah and Bubblewrap.

Interesting Glow in UV light fluorescent acrylic painted shoes using whacky Thumbdemon characters.

07 Ape Mountain and Candy Monsta’.

Personalized spray cans designed to depict corporate life and frivolous things that make us happy.

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Bohemian Fantasies

When you are on the road, you discover multiple dimensions of the same thing. Concept artist and illustrator Harshvardhan Kadam tells us how travelling becomes a process of visual storytelling.

creative_gaga March/April 2011

Pune-based concept artist and illustrator Harshvardhan Kadam draws a lot of inspiration from Indian history, mythology and his frequent road trips.

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Senses open up when you travel. On the road, one can discover manifold dimensions of the same subject. Ideas and perspectives, thus born out of diverse environments and influences, give rise to visual layering, not always limited to aesthetics.

These layers give way to a dynamic narrative even in a static space > 01 creativegaga.com

Figures GagaGod Vaibhav Kumaresh is a Mumbai-based animation film-maker and director of Vaibhav Studios. A Fine Arts graduate, Vaibhav studied at NID. He also teaches animation and is a visiting faculty at various animation schools across India.

SIMPU

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SAGA Animation is as much about good story telling as it is about aesthetics. Vaibhav Kumaresh created the beloved Simpu Singh in his mind before he even finished school. Here reveals how he creates these engrossing tales.

A plot gives characters the platform to perform. A story and a character share a symbiotic relationship. One is because of the other. Animation is all about storytelling. So figuring out the plot is of top-most priority. Once that is in place, the story determines what traits and mannerisms the characters would display. Keeping the storyline as the focus, everything else has to radiate out from there. As an animation artist, you have to pick cues from the story to develop a basic character sketch and then work on detailing so that they fit accordingly in a particular scenario. This way, synergy is established from start to finish. However, it may also happen that the unique characteristics of a character you design determine what happens in a story >

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Figures StudioScope

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Mumbai based illustratordesigner, Sameer Kulavoor of Bombay Duck Design brings the story of everyday life alive through his designs and illustrations, with a unique touch of his own.

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Inspiration Illustration designer Sameer Kulavoor of Bombay Duck Design believes the key to great design is in understanding one’s own culture. Here, he tells us about his beliefs and methods.

Studio

Keep it personal. It pays to be abiding to your own background. The people, places, every nook and corner, that we usually ignore most of the times, hold some of the freshest ideas.

They have a tale-bearing character, waiting to be put down on paper. Getting inspired from the myriad facets of everyday life makes designs varied and refreshingly different every time. For the cover design of “Something Relevant”, we studied the dynamic city life and captured one of its moments. We got a panoramic streetview of the mishmash called Mumbai.

Artistic style explores the extent of every idea. An idea drives the style. Before putting pen to paper, or a brush to canvas, an idea has to take shape in the mind. Right after, the process of improvisation starts >

creativegaga.com

Figures IconWatch

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capture the essence of the personality that’s beyond the canvass, you won’t get the true caricature. For instance, a politician with a meek character has a reduced size, almost like a dwarf, in his caricature. An upright nose can symbolize the snootiness of a character. A lot of things around the politician also help weave a persona and lend character to the caricature.

Having said so, a caricature also evolves with time. Just like the person and his character do. The MM Singh I used to draw in 1990s was totally different from how I draw him now. His caricature has evolved with him. My caricature of PVN Rao, towards the end of his tenure, began to look more like him than he himself did!

Style is not something that you begin with, but what you arrive at. Cartoons are lines that talk of an idea.

They are supposed to be raw, basic and earthy. Style, like the opinions, evolves with time. I like to keep my cartoons simple, straight-forward and without any frills. As I speak on the common man’s behalf, my lines speak a language that the masses can relate to. Each line has a personality that has over the years naturally formed through experiences and exposure. For a cartoonist, these naked raw lines define his style. creative_gaga March/April 2011

Inspiration gets updated every moment. In the age of instant news on TV and Internet, it’s tough to be able to draw a cartoon that survives the next 24 hours. Technology has made several things much easier. It has also facilitated the artistic and delivery process. Although I still draw on a paper with brush and ink, it’s easier to do the editing on Photoshop and mail it across.

It’s both funny and heartbreaking to see that the cartoons I created 25 years ago are still equally relevant. Regrettably, because the socio-political issues like corruption, unemployment, poverty, illiteracy, hunger etc. still remain as valid as they were decades ago. Today, cartoons end up competing with headlines.

The life of a drawing is too short to relish. TV and internet have brought us into the age of instant news.

A cartoon can become stale even before it is printed! So, one has to be aware of the challenge to draw a cartoon that will outlive the headlines.

The new generation is tech-savvy and is becoming more evolved and aware of the issues that agitate them. I only hope that cartooning becomes more relevant than ever before with the new and intellectually evolved audience.

The biggest cartooning lesson is to keep the ideas simple and the design uncomplicated. If you want to be a cartoonist, you’re most welcome. Draw a lot, read a lot and have a lot of patience <

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Podium AvantGarde

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CG: How are calligraphy and typography saviors of scripts?

AW: Because the commercial arena rarely encourages practices involving Indian typography, this endeavour helped showcase the fascinating use of Indian scripts through original designs. The use of computers and available fonts often limit the expressions and styles of a designer. It is important to explore the potential in each letter in various media to revive Indian scripts and their usage. In this event, the participants worked together to create their artworks for the Aksharaya and Cordenons Collaborative Calendar 2011 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a perfect showcase of word play <

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06 ‘Blossom’ in Malayalam.

08 ‘I’ in all Indian languages.

07 ‘Kabootar’, hindi for Dove, written in Devanagari.

09 ‘Security’ as written in Telegu script.

10 Artists at work.

11 A ‘Labyrinth’ in Gurmukhi.

12 ‘Life’, expressed through Bengali script.

13 Oriya for ‘Female’.

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