Vinayak Varma

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.

This is a continuation of my earlier post on the work I did for Jackfruit Research & Design / Art, Resources & Teaching from 2006-2007.

The following are pen-and-ink illustrations I drew for Love Bangalore, the first Bangalore edition of
Aussie publisher Fiona Caulfield's 'Love Travel Guides' (which are wrapped in silk, printed on expensive handmade paper and unapologetically cater to the type of wealthy traveller who dies violently in the second act of an Hercule Poirot movie). These illustrations found mention, I was later thrilled to find out, in the July 2008 issue of Creative Review.

A vegetable vendor

A couple of years after I graduated from design school by the very skin of my teeth - equipped with a diploma in fine arts that was recognized (then) by no known university, a terror of commitment and five years' worth of dilettantish dabbling - I became a professional loafer in Madras. I started hanging around at the British Council library all day, acting in the odd amateur play, taking on the sort of low-paying jobs that required only trace amounts of effort, watching thiruttu-DVD movies through the night, piling on flab like bones were going out of style and generally cluttering up my parents' home. It was like The Graduate, but without the scuba gear and Mrs. Robinson. Who am I kidding - it was horrible.

And then there came shining through the murk a job opening at this tiny arts organisation in ye olde Bangalore, like a lighthouse in a rocky fjord of aimlessness. I think this came at the fag end of 2006, if I remember right. Jackfruit Research & Design / Art, Resources & Teaching (A.R.T.) - the 'design' firm - consisted of a library, two art historians, a DTP operator and no designer. It was a modest start-up run out of a teeny tiny dollhouse office in Cook Town, the salary they offered was time-capsuled from the '80s, and no one else in the business had ever heard of them. But it also offered a clean slate: I had no expectations, I desperately needed an escape route, the arts library was superb, and the office served a delicious and healthy lunch (with fried fish once a week!). So I took the job.

And what a great decision it turned out to be, especially in retrospect. The advantage of working for a tiny-but-ambitious organisation - particularly if you give in to the prevalent delusions of oncoming grandeur and allow your situation, however modest, to expand and fill up your psyche - is that you will work and try stuff and create things like you have nothing to lose and everything to prove. At Jackfruit, I hustled to take on every kind of project that I could lay my hands on (even as Jackfruit hustled and entrepreneured their way into every kind of project that they could lay their grubby hands on). I designed promo material and collateral for art shows, helped curate and design travelling photography exhibitions, illustrated books and posters, researched, wrote and designed signage for a historic Rajasthani fort, and got to travel and engage with sundry creative types across the country. By the time I quit my job at the end of a year (the aforementioned synthpop-era salary became unsustainable, particularly in light of the rising costs of rent and beer), I had gained a portfolio, some exposure, a bunch of experience, and loads of confidence. Oh, and a cutely daft modicum of arrogance, even. I still look back on my time spent at Jackfruit, as well as my colleagues there, with endless affection.

Below is a selection of the work I did while at JRD/A.R.T.

|Disclaimer: much of the following work was either guided or art directed by Annapurna Garimella, the proprietor and lead researcher at the firm, who usually initiated the concept discussions on all the projects we took up. So I can't take full credit for the ideas represented here - only for the final visuals.|

Poster for the Emerging Artist Award, 2007, commissioned by the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA)

Detail from the cover art for Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan

And then there was some work that I did on a couple of Hachette books for adults, while I was freelancing a few years ago. The artwork you see below consists of the cover and some pieces of interior artwork for Vijay Nair's The Boss is Not Your Friend, followed by the cover of Zac O'Yeah's Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan. The interior art for the former was left out of the final book (I was told that it was too cerebral for the target audience - which, bless 'em, was probably just a polite way of saying that the cartoons sucked). The Scandinavistan cover, meanwhile, ranks among my best work. I thoroughly enjoyed working on it.

Hachette India started its children's books division fairly recently, and I was privileged to contribute to some of their early projects, around four years ago. The cover designs and illustrations you see below were created for special one-off books that Hachette commissioned to capitalize on random Hallmark holidays - in the current examples, specifically, for Friendship Day, Mother's Day and Father's Day. The illustrations are fairly straightforward and risk-free, as you can see, but that was precisely my brief: to just make them friendly, colourful and appealing on a crowded bookshelf, nothing more, nothing less. I'll leave it to you to decide if I succeeded or not.

Rough sketch for Friends Forever book cover

Friends Forever, Hachette - Friendship Day stories

Kicking off my series of rough/rejected/unfinished work samples is the following set of artwork from various Scholastic projects.