illustration

did the illustration above for Forbes India this past week for a cover story on the march of walmart into india. freelance work on super express deadlines are fun and challenging.issue is on the stands till oct 23.
got the gig thru arindam duttgupta, design director of forbes india who was with timeout;whom i did an illustration for in '07.

photo post 2

photo-post

update

been working on a few websites(!)
one where i can put up some recent/new work, mostly city-related.

one for the majlis fellowship work from 2007 ( will try & finish it
by july/aug end-then share)
aaaaand later, one just for personal work (ufff)

oh,and i'll be working on my 2nd project, i.e funding that i have
gotten under the UDRI fellowship program, to do a study of
philanthropic/trust buildings in bombay and the deliverable is a
graphic novel.so, excited about that.
and all that work will start in august.
but relieved at the somewhat-longterm-ness of it. :)

the city related work & website is

http://cityinflux.com

i will continuously/as and when i get time update this with new work,
unrelated to the projects at hand .it's a place to put down some
things in my head.and to collaborate.and to corroborate
it's my first website!!!
you may also email me at ranjit@cityinflux.com :)
much thanks to the gorgeous nidhi for the website design & for
handling my other internet issues.
and to jayson for doing other things, amidst all the 'flash'ing.:)

ice

shiva

new fun commission has happened.
a friend requested a graphic-bookish lord shiva.which i am attempting.
still dappling between moderate 3/2 foot size or a larger 4/3.
his brief was-no smiley faced rave t-shirt happy shiva iconography, which is so far from his actual supposed demeanour and behaviour.lord shiva means business,even in the heierarchy of all the hindu gods.no one messes with him.(you want an audience with him, you have to double or triple the no of years you'd do tapasya for any other regular wish-granting god.)
he's the reason lord brhama doesnt have any temples-save one, etc etc
tried to convince my friend to let me make a drawing with scrolls and lots of shiva mythology,stories from ganesha to kashi.but he vetoed me.he just wants his shiva to be doing kadak tapasya and generally looking ominous.we even debated the pet cobra biting him, which is what a pet cobra would do....not lick the owner's face, right? but then went back to sedate posing cobra.
need to move the drawing to canvas now.

commercial-street 1

i'm finding this drawing tricky as gravity seems to act on it.but i'm also enjoying it thoroughly.
i've tried to take 2 or sometimes more orientations/alignments for the figures while viewing,hoping that when viewed in that 45 deg & 0/90 the figures don't start doing funny things.
i've started to appreciate these niches & how for eg some figure can be walking/standing etc when viewed one way and then be suddenly lying flat on it's side as though riding some imaginary cycle.
figures tilt and sway dangerously till i erase and correct bit by bit.

posting these sketches in order to make myself work on it,hopefully everyday.
will keep updating this drawing -then move onto next street,and then transfer this one to the painting.
then paint it!

commercial market- image 9

This illustration has come about from a need to represent the various markets that co-exist in the null bazaar area-kika street, bapu khote street etc . All these streets house multiple-level and multiple-usage residential and commercial activity spaces.
There are no clear zones for these businesses. Broadly ,each street has its own specialty and is known by reputation for the wares that are made, and sold here, but within each street there are complex tenancies and street conditions coupled with infrastructure and accessibility complications.
Saurabh’s idea for this diagram aims to allow these multiples lenses to highlight these recesses.
My job of rendering the image extends to using these selective foci to show the street activity, by pretty much attempting the same principle as saurabh,but applying it figuratively.
The painting has reached a stage where the buildings are beginning to get defined, and sleeping quarters, street activities,vendors,restaurant owners,mutton-shops,medical stores, streets selling only metalwares,copper etc are all beginning to get layered one over the other.
The way the people will negotiate this winding street remains to be seen as a sincere effort will be made to highlight it in such a way as to inform the viewer about the complexity of such a site .

nightwalk

Official Nostalgia- VII (almost done! :))

lb downtown
lb boulevard
huntington
malibu
csulb
rite-aid
belmont chi town
pch
broadway
McDonalds

winding down...

Random post 1 - holga

I could put Bappi-da to shame with the way I feel about this.



The ebay ad that accompanies it....

Did you think your eyes were open? I'm afraid to say that until this very moment they have been closed. The unassuming Holga is here to save you from a future of digital pixels and images shared on small screens on cameras or phones. We have all become numbed with photography, there is no denying it, but a chunky camera made almost entirely of plastic has been put on this Earth to save us. It will reawaken your vision, fill you with joy, make you see beauty when you thought it had disappeared forever, and bring out sunshine on a cloudy day.

Random post 2- cdbaby

A kind friend ordered a couple of cd’s for me from this site, (jude), and this is the email they sent him.-


Dear Matthew,

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make
sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that
money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, January 28th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year". We're all
exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Random post 3- Tekkon Kinreet

I have been zoning out. Watching these images and others for some time now, so I just screen grabbed some and am posting.

need to filch more.

turning into technicolor

i've been wanting to post these photos for a long time.
we each have our own sets of photographs similar to this one.
we always have photographs that mean the most to no one but ourselves.
the ones we keep in specific folders and revisit from time to time or sooner.
which we can happily look at time and again.
we add meaning to those photos, by finishing what's missing in them - looking /leafing/clicking /lingering
we usually take those photos to capture precisely those instances.and promptly lose them somewhere in the photos themselves.
i love these photographs of mine, which may seem very important to me today or highly unspectacular on some other day.
each one having some or a lot of history attached to it.taken by me and a friend of mine.
Some vivid memories that seemed to escape me, which while attempting to capture only seem to be in the vicinity of these photographs.
wish we could always decide and sometimes store for posterity, something more "usable".