Image making by Pratyush Das

Image making

Pratyush Das

Contents

Composite Images

Simplification of Form

Letter Integration

1 Composite Images Kalinga (Kalia) Enormous black snake with many heads(most say 5), oozing with venom. No enemies but one Garuda. But Garuda was cursed and couldn’t go to Vrindavan hence Kalia resided there.

The story

Historical aspect

There are many stories about how Krishna went there. Some say it was for playing and some say for drinking water.A single ‘Kadamba’ tree had survived Kalia’s poison. Kalia attacked but the young Krishna came out victorious dancing on Kalia’s head.Kalia’s queens begged for mercy and Kalia accepted defeat.Kalia fled to ‘Ramanaka Dwipa’ on a condition that Krishna wouldn’t let Garuda hurt him.Some indentify the islands as Fiji islands.

King Kalia of ‘Kalivaman’ jaat gotra resided on the banks of river Yamuna. Ruins of kalivaman fort can be found in Mathura. The black snake could be an imagery of some bad ruler of this clan. With the victory Of Krishna against the King came the end of this clan in Brij. They were said to have fled o Kabul-Ghazni and founded the kingdom of Garh-Ghazni. Possible metaphors As interpreted by some the five heads represent the five senses which when left uncontrolled poison our sorroundings. The snake begging for forgiveness shows it was afflicted with ego. The detail of the imagery of the story is such that it depicts and embodies the historical event (if there ever was one) and the metaphors and symbolisms in a very subtle and graceful manner such that it has had an impact on music and dance forms also. eg. the stamping of feet and the various hand gestures, etc.

Chimera (Chimaera)

Hypothesis

Derivation of the elements

A monstrous fire breathing animal(female) with three heads, one of a lioness, a goat, and a dragon and its tail endind with a snake head. It is the offspring of Echidna and Typhon in Lycia in Asia Minor. It symbolised the transformation from Goddess to an evil monster. It was killed by Bellerophon on Pegasus, a flying horse that kept him at safe distance while attacking.

The creature was identified with an area of permanent gas vents on the Lycian way in southwest Turkey.

The winged lion in Sumerian-Babylonian mythology was a storm beast and was called "Cheimon" in ancient greek.

Symbolisms (as a myth)

The goat symbolizes devil in European mythology and is one of the Satyrs in Greek mythology.

It is a grotesque image of the mother Goddess and an embodiment of all the evil in women that men think of. The snake is another The three forms: A noble malignant character in most and radiant lioness head, mythologies. the filthy belly of the goat and the virulent tail of the viper was to show that a woman is beautiful to look upon, contaminating to touch and deadly to keep.

Every element used in the imagery of this creature has a derivative from various older cultures. It shows how powerful such an imagery can be made and the meanings it conveys. It is a lot like forgetting the practical aspect and adding meaning to the visual by just treating it as a new form made by assembling various pre-existing imager in our minds just to convey a feel visually and that satisfies its practicality since it is formed for that purpose.

Simplification of Form

The assignment aimed at making us observe a certain object or form in this case my potrait and represent it using minimum elements. Skillwise it brings a new aspect of seeing things. ie. instead of outlines you search for features and light and shade and other ways of looking at the object.

Here I traced my potrait in various levels reducing elements step by step to minimum recognisable elements and then digitised them. I started the process using light and shade for getting the forms but after a level it came down to simplifying those individual elements.

Dealing only in black and white as the negative space I moved to use basic elements like line and dots to represent the form both manually and digitally. Some of the experiments seem illegible at a small scale but would make sense on a larger print when viewed from a distance because then our mind reads the tries forming an image once we look at it as a one unit with different wieghts separating the image and non-image areas

I tried involving my research on monochromacy from our colour course and made these using colours of the same intensity. So to a complete monochromat these images would look flat of the grey tone above. It was a kind of experiment the helped me to come up with a poster for the monochromats that can be deciphered only by them and not by people with normal vision.

Continuing the same excercise I took the gramophone to reduce its elements again step by step to this where it is still recognisable and yet has almost only one major continuous element. Infact the last image above is one continuous element with no breaks or fully enclosed white space.

Letter Integration

The letters I had to integrate were ‘P’ and ‘N’. I didn’t use typefaces and rather went about exploring manually with the forms and integrating shapes like triangles, etc. and letting Gestalt do the rest. I felt it gave an idea as a start to develope symbols and logotypes like there are certain examples where I came up with a new form and it made some meaning or looked like something familiar as a form.

Numbers are an abstract, values that are meant for our convienence.So integerating a number with a letter was also similar once I started looking at it as a mere form. I had to integrate ‘P’ and ‘1’ but I also tried my hands on ‘6’ probably because ‘1’ has the simplest of forms in the roman numbering system and there are only certain ways one can play around with a single line. I made these few integrations and after that every option looked like a slight iteration of the other which basically meant that the overall form was similar so i switched to ‘6’.

Letter integration according to me was a major assignment where we had to integrate two alphabets by dealing with only the form, irrespective of the preset imagery in our minds and the story behind their evolution. It required us to treat each letter as just a form and integrating it in a way that it doesn’t loose either alphabet’s characteristics and yet doesn’t look out of place.

P 1 P 1P 1P P

1 P1