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My second day of Comic Konga is here, and since today is halloween, I thought I would do something appropriate.

Day 2. I have been hearing the buzz about J.K. Rowling recently declaring Albus Dumbledore’s sexual persuasion, as a sort of post mortem to the series. I’ve also been hearing all the people complaining or lauding the gesture on her part. I think all of that is rubbish. She’s a writer of fiction, and a very good one at that. Let her do or say whatever she wants. It’s not supposed to have some great social significance. It’s a story, and the only real interest in this extra information is for other writers who enjoy this sort of world-building data. The rest of the human race needs to get a life. Considering all the noise, this little halloween gag came to mind, and I thought it was the perfect fodder for another comic.

I just finished reading the last of the Harry Potter books a couple of days ago. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and I can say categorically that no new revelations about anyone’s sexual orientation within the world of the books is going to change anything as far as the narrative goes. It’s a very rich world that Rowling has created and if she chooses to share some of her thought process in coming up with the various characters, I don’t see why it needs to be an issue. Some people are just waiting around to be incensed and shocked.

And so, speaking of shock, with this comic I wish you all a Happy Halloween.

Samir

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Welcome to my first contribution to the first ever Comic Konga! What is Comic Konga? It is a little blog comic festival of sorts, thought up by Vishal. The idea is to post 5 days of original comic content to your blog. The official start was yesterday, but since I missed a day, I’ll just make up an extra day at the end.

I haven’t been drawing much recently, and I haven’t created a comic of any sort for years. Unfortunately I’ve also not got the opportunity in recent times to create much illustrated content for clients, so this is a great excuse to exercise my comic-ing muscles.

Day 1, my first attempt. I wanted to start simple, so after I got the initial gag into my head, I did a simple sketch with a ball-point pen in my sketch book. That was scanned in and taken into Inkscape. A vector tracing and some simple flat gray vector shapes later, it was complete.

Creating comic strips and even a single panel one such as this is a lot of fun. I love the combination of writing and art, and it’s something that can give you the satisfaction of completion fairly quickly. I am looking forward to doing more over the coming days. Hope you like it, and feel free to share it with others. I thing it is quite apt for the Web 2.0 and social bookmarking world we live in.

Samir

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brainstorming n. intensive discussion to solve problems or generate ideas

That’s what my dictionary says, and it is absolutely right. Brainstorming is always a discussion, but what gets most people confused is that they often need to generate ideas on their own, without the benefit of discussion with another human being. Creative pursuits can be very solitary activities. In fact, they often have to be for best results, especially in the early stages. So how do you generate ideas and discuss these ideas with yourself? In case you are convinced that your creativity requires a healthy helping of multiple personality disorder to survive, fear not, because there are healthier ways to light those creative sparks. One method I always like to use when brainstorming for new ideas is flipping through a dictionary.

To most people a dictionary is a dry and boring book. It has a lot of interesting words in it, but no gripping plot or characters to speak of. How can you possibly be inspired to create by such a regimental piece of literature? To answer that question, here a few dictionary techniques I use when I am looking for solution to a creative problem:

1. Seek Knowledge
2. Divide and Rule
3. Be A Good Neighbour
4. Take A Leap Of Faith
5. Respect History
6. Take Action

If all that sounded mysterious and cryptic, lets move on to the specifics of each of these techniques. To help make things clearer, let me take on the hypothetical challenge of braistorming for an image or illustration idea for the word brainstorm. Using these very techniques that I am about to describe, lets see what ideas we can come up with.

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It all started with a phone call. Some friends of mine were leaving town and shifting back to France, and I was left wondering what I could possibly give them as a parting gift. An international move is no simple task and so giving my friends a domesticated Indian elephant or anything similarly cumbersome was out of the question. I would have to stick to something simple like a card - easy to carry, and it can say and mean so much if done properly.

It had to be really special though, so I thought I would up the ante and make it a pop up card. Paper crafts have been an obsession of mine since well before I can remember. I’ve always loved the feeling of creating something out of seemingly nothing and creating three dimensions out of two. In recent times all my paper projects have been heavily based on computer layouts and imagery, but due to time constraints on this one I decided to go caveman and create this card in the good old-fashioned digital-free way that I used in a time before keyboards, mice, bits and bytes.

The experience was extremely rewarding and I think everyone should do this sort of non-digital creative work on occasion to jolt your thinking a little. Here are some general pointers on how you can go about it for best results, along with the story of my pop up card about ‘home’.

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A few days ago I finally received some copies of a quarterly print newsletter I work on with Vishal. I’ve been working on this regularly for over two years now. For most of that time I worked on it with Anjali. In fact we came up with it together from scratch when a local engineering contracting company in Dubai wanted a complete makeover of their in-house newsletter. During that time I had very little to do with design and production, which was handled by Anjali using the standard Photoshop + Illustrator + InDesign setup. At the end of last year she moved home-base so I took over the mantle of getting this done every three months with Vishal’s help. The first major stumbling block was that I didn’t currently own Photoshop or Illustrator or InDesign, and I hadn’t owned or used them in a long time. Since the last few years had been almost completely devoid of large scale print projects for me, I had never felt the need. I had moved on to open source software.
(Read more…)

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Did you know that March used to be the first month of the year?

It’s true. In fact, January and February didn’t even exist until they were invented by the Romans around 700BC. And it was a whole 650 years later that Julius Caesar declared January to be the first month of the year. He really liked pushing people around, that guy. But some people refused to be pushed. You’ll be surprised to learn that January didn’t become the official beginning of the year in France until the 1500s. And the British colonies didn’t accept the January New Year until the mid 1700s.

Now put yourself into March’s shoes. It must be the most disgruntled month of them all. How would you like to have enjoyed the limelight for so long and then to be cast aside as simply that calendar month that appears between that very short month of the year and April fools day, and everyone was told to beware of your ‘ides’? Not very glamorous is it?

Purely to make it up to our much loved and very hard working month of March, I present to you this table calendar that you can print out and put together. I hope you enjoy it and I encourage you to forward it to everyone you know who would appreciate the chance for a fresh start.

Wishing you a very Happy New Year. It’s never too late for new beginnings …

Download PDF (483 kb)

For all you wallpaper enthusiasts, here are large versions of the illustration from the calendar for your desktop:

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I submitted an image for last weeks Weekend Challenge over at Elysiun. I was thinking of putting it up on this blog when I realised that I have not recorded my previous two etries into the WC either. So here, for my own reference more than anything else, is a list of my last three entries for the WC - along with links to the appropriate Elysiun forum threads, so that I don’t have a hard time finding them in the future if I need to.

Weekend Challenge #101 : All Alone
Voting Thread
My thread in Finished Projects

This was a composited image using a regular photograph I took specifically for this project. It started mainly as a test of some compositing tutorials I came across on the forums. It turned out pretty well and the simple character model really did end up looking very lonely. Also, surprise surprise! I actually WON this challenge, in spite of this not being a pure Blender entry. Although it was only by a hair. I later modified some of the shadows falling on the character to make it a little more realistic. You can view that modified version of the image on my portfolio page.


Weekend Challenge #103 : Cyberpunk
Voting Thread
My thread in Finished Projects

I had a very complex scene in mind for this challenge, which involved sprawling desolate landscapes and futuristic towers littered around the landscape. I managed to complete most of the modelling and texturing, but my trusty old Pentium 1 laptop simply could not handle what I was throwing at it. So, I used the models I had come up with, i.e. the gloved hand and the futuristic tower, to create up a simpler and more iconic image. I was pretty happy with it and liked the slightly renegade look of the scene, but I was not totally satisfied that it was finished. There were only a handful of entries that week and I came in a very far second in the final count. I went on to improve the image by strengthening the ligting and adding a bloom/glow effect in Blenders sequence editor. The modified version is on my portfolio page. Hopefully one day I will get back to these models and recreate the original scene I had in mind. Hmm …


Weekend Challenge #112 : Primitives
Voting Thread
No Finished Projects thread for this one

I decided to participate in a challenge after a long sabatical, not only from the WC, but also in some ways from Blender (barring the Techman character I’v been updating on this blog). While I got the idea early, the execution of it was one of those last minute things and was finished in a couple of hours. I wasn’t very happy with the result, and the challenge that week was very well populated. I stood a far nowhere in the voting. But, I do think this scene is a good start, and I do intend to finish it to my satisfaction. Once that is done the new version will definitely be put up here. Untill then, the latest Weekened Challneg is also coming to a close tomorrow. I’m going to try my best to throw in my hat into this one as well.

Samir

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