Showing posts with label drawings. Show all posts
    Showing posts with label drawings. Show all posts
  • A storm is coming.


    This one landed on my lap some four or five years ago, not long after I'd quit my job at the New Indian Express and was loafing around Bangalore without work, succumbing by slow degrees to depression and creative desolation. It began with an email from a friend, introducing me to another friend of his. This friend-of-a-friend (yes, this is going to be one of those stories), I was told, was a hotshot journo working for TNIE in Chennai, and he had a script for a graphic novel, which he was going to self-publish, and he was looking for an illustrator, and would I be interested in working with him, because it was going to be awesome and I was jobless anyway so what the hell?

  • In 2008, I joined the staff of a local listings magazine called The Bengaluru Pages. TBP was owned by MP/businessman Rajeev Chandrasekhar's Jupiter Group, and it shared its offices with Radio Indigo. This was the first time I had worked for a periodical, the first time I had stepped into a proper radio studio (where I got to record a couple of funny voice-overs for ads, for the first time), the first time I had my articles published in a magazine, and the first time I was earning enough to be able to eat out regularly at expensive restaurants. It was all happening, and it was awesome. By the end of that year, my byline was getting seen all over town, and ditto with my waistline.

    TBP was amazing for both my career and self-esteem. Putting together a 100-page magazine every two weeks, illustrating for it, writing for it, editing for it, spending nights at the office for it, and hitting up PR people for free movies, events and meals for it, all of it teaches you to properly balance working hard and playing hard. It teaches you discipline and it teaches you abandon. These are the sort of experiences that you should actively hunt out if you want to understand your true limits. TBP made me grow the **** up. But TBP also taught me to abandon any Ozymandias-ish pretensions I had about the longevity of my work, because the magazine shut down after less than two years of operations, burying with it hundreds and hundreds of pages worth of time, creativity and sheer effort that its little team had invested in it. Man, but I still miss working there.

    |Note: As the magazine is dead, my TBP illustrations now belong to me. If you'd like to reuse any of them, write to me. This is shameless and morbid, I know, I know, but it's also good commerce!|

    Here's a sampling of the illustrations and designs I created for The Bengaluru Pages. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

    Paper-collage illustration for a special travel issue of The Bengaluru Pages
  • Most of the work presented below (barring one illustration at the very end of this post) was done for The Magic Store of Nu Cham Vu, a children's fantasy adventure written by my father (Shreekumar Varma) and published by Puffin. The book is full of surreal and magical characters and situations, so illustrating it was a great workout for my visual imagination.

    A note on the book cover: The final cover design for the book (seen at the bottom of this post) was not done by me. The Disney-Aladdin-style typography isn't something I would have gone with, nor do I approve of the dull colour scheme and composition. The cover does use a portion of one of my illustrations, though, but it's been rather poorly cut up without my final approval. (If I sound belligerent and defensive, it's because I am, slightly. Then again, I'm also an inveterate control freak.) In any case, you'll see all my original concepts and artwork for the cover below, so you can compare the lot for yourself.

    Nu Cham Vu's magic cat, from The Magic Store of Nu Cham Vu, Puffin

  • The first major book project I worked on after completing The Insect Boy was Penguin's The Tenth Rasa, an anthology of nonsense -- poems, stories and songs -- from India. This was in 2005, if memory serves. This book was edited and compiled by Michael Heyman, Sumanyu Satpathy and Anushka Ravishankar. (Heyman, who has since gone onto shepherd more, bigger and exponentially frabjuous nonsense anthologies, is now considered the leading nonsense-rasika in the biz.) They came up with such hilarious and imaginative material for the book that it remains the most fun project I've worked on. Oh, and mine isn't the only artwork in the book: two of my co-illustrators, it is my distinct privilege to claim, are Sukumar Ray and Edward Lear!

    My brief from the art director at Penguin was to come up with simple line drawings that could scale easily, along with a colourful cover that properly conveyed the idea of the title. This idea, as you've probably guessed, is that the navarasas are all well and good, but that the complete range of human emotions is effectively inaccessible without the tenth and most evocative rasa: nonsense. You'll see what I came up with for the cover, as well as the interior artwork, below.


    Book cover illustrations and hand-done typography for The Tenth Rasa, Penguin

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