Can you have too much of a good thing? I hope not, because my first paper cut in ages was definitely a good thing from my viewpoint. It was fun to do, and the results were attractive enough. Now that I’m in the paper cutting zone, so to speak, I thought I might as well exploit it and do something for the dawn of the new year.

This time a got a little more ambitions, and really didn’t even think about the fact that this would have to eventually be cut out in tiny slivers of paper. Instead I just got an image in mind and scribbled until what I had was a base sketch for a decent illustration. Then it was a simple matter of executing this illustration as a paper cut. Not really simple, but hey! I’m allowed my 1st of January bravado just like eveyone else.

After another few hours of careful cutting, hunched over a sheet of paper with a craft knife, this is what I turned out and I am pleasantly surprised. You see, while the christmas paper cut was fairly planned from the beginning as a flat paper cut design, this one had more complex bits that were layerd, so all the decisions of what had to be cut and not cut out, were taken while I was cutting. I’m happy with the result.

What I like about this one is that it’s as non-traditional a paper cutting as you can get. Every art form has its conventional motifs and symbols. Paper cuts, being a fairly traditional craft, usualy feature very classical themes, animals, patterns, and very arts-and-crafts imagery. This one has a ray gun!

A Very Happy New Year to you all. It’s the future! May your days be filled with the interestingly unconventional, and may all your paper cuts have spaceships.

Samir

A few weeks ago I was chatting with a friend when the topic turned to paper crafts and our mutual interest in them. She shared some gorgeous designs she’d come across for paper cuttings, which she had put up on her tumblr blog. I was a little surprised, because I had not heard paper cutting mentioned for a long time. In fact, I didn’t think I knew anyone personally who was even aware of the craft, let alone a fan of it.

I had tried my hand at it a long time ago, copying designs from an old book of Japanese paper crafts and carefully scoring lines with an old blunt craft knife. I had been ok at it, but I never really explored it too much beyond the initial experiments. That was more than a decade ago.

This new discussion reminded me of that and I decided that I’d throw my hat into the paper cutting ring again. As with everything else, though, I wanted to do everything from scracth. None of that tracing designs and cutting out someone else’s pattern for me, no siree! I was going to do an original.

Many days past with nothing done, and when Christmas Eve arrived, I decided enough was enough and sat down to scribble out a design. The idea seemed reasonable and doable, so I cleaned up the pencil marks on my sheet of 160gsm photocopy paper, placed it on an old tabloid newspaper and took my not-too-sharp old paper knife to it with as much skill as I could muster. Almost two hours later, I had what you see in the photos.

As with previous on-the-spur experiments with paper craft, I really enjoyed this and it’s very satisfying to chuck the planning and procrastination, and just make something. I’m happy with the way this turned out, and I think this is my new medium of choice for spontaneous themed illustration. Hopefully, there’s much more to come.

Samir

I started drawing more sketches very soon after my last session of pen drawings, within a few days in fact. I was in the mood. But after having looked at my last drawings, which were done with a fair amount of abandon, I started to think too much. The first drawing that followed (above) was stiff and over-done. Then I picked up another magazine for inspiration and tried again.

This is what I got, after a lot of struggle and long slow sessions trying to get everything looking just right. I wasn’t even sure what to do with the rest of the page, so I left it alone and decided to come back to it later.

That was over a month ago. Today, I needed to draw to maintain my sanity. When you feel overwhelmed by things, drawing is a great productive escape. So, I picked up the same magazine I had put down a month ago and started drawing very quickly. These are what I got.

Except for the very first drawing in this post, all the images here were put together by looking at a single magazine. They are all collages, including the drawing of the couple, which is made of two different images that I thought went well together. Speed was my main aim here and I tried various thought processes along the way. The man in the jacket was draw by blindly rendering the details without paying attention to the over-all image. The couple were drawn trying to use as little as possible to express as much as was needed. And in the last one, things were distorted and stretched to fit the elements on the page, rather than to maintain proportions.

The speed worked out well. All the three images drawn today were finished in little over an hour. If I keep this up, I might actually get somewhere with my drawing skills. I’m nowhere near making accurate likenesses, but I do think the images are becoming more interesting, which is what counts in the end.

Samir

I haven’t drawn in ages. Let me clarify. It’s not like I haven’t drawn anything recently, I draw doodles and thumbnails of things all the time. I’m a designer and a lot of my ideas come out in tiny visual sketches. But those are all documentary and explanatory drawings. I haven’t sat down and sketched anything purely for the sake of drawing in ages. Wanting to break the long famine of purely exploratory sketching, today I set out to do some pen drawings.

Most people don’t think of the standard ball point pen as a drawing instrument. I love it for drawing, and there are a few reasons for it. Firstly, it’s not a specialist artist’s tool. It’s office equipment, and the idea of using something so ubiquitous to produce beautiful imagery excites me. Secondly, I like the fact that I can’t erase my mistakes with a ball point pen. There is a certain freedom that comes from the permanence of the pen and ink on paper. You can just let go, put line down on paper, and simply live with your mistakes, incorporating them into the finished piece. It frees you up from over thinking the drawing process, and it also encourages a certain level of mental discipline to put down only those lines which you think are absolutely necessary.

I set myself the task of finishing at least three A4 sheets of sketches today, which I did. I sat down with a bunch of magazines, opened them up and chose interesting images in sequence which I then proceeded to sketch quickly on the paper, directly with the pen. There was no plan or decided layout. An image was chosen, it was drawn on the sheet and then another was chosen and drawn until the sheet was filled to satisfaction. Obviously, there was some thought put into where to place the next piece of imagery, but since all the elements that were to go in were never pre-decided, the collages have a randomness to them which I like.

For a beginning after such a long hiatus, I am quite pleased with the results. Each of these took me about 30 minutes to complete. While the quality of the drawing is not quite up to even my mediocre standards when I was drawing more regularly, It’s nice to see I haven’t lost it completely. A bit of regular practice should bring me back up to speed soon enough. At least with the excuse of putting up sketches on this blog, I can push myself to do this more regularly. Any sketching and drawing fans out there.? What are your experiences with sketching and keeping in practice?

Samir

All good things must come to an end, as does this edition of Comic Konga with this comic. I haven’t been the most punctual participant, but I’m glad I completed the set of five, and that too keeping to my parameters of using the same character. It’s been a great exercise and I will certainly tackle comics with less trepidation in the future. Anyone interested can subscribe to Vishal’s feed to know when the next one is happening.

Day 5: Love is in the Air, and our everyman robot is reacting in his own little predictably unpredictable way. The point of this one was to continue with the more complex scene setups, and to end with a straightforward caption piece. I’m quite happy with the finished visual because I had a specific look in mind and it took plenty of redraws to get it right.

The final, much erased and worked over, pencil sketch on A4 photocopy paper was traced with a black finetip pen. The inks were scanned and vectorised in Inkscape. Blue tones and text were also applied in Inkscape.

I hear love is a wonderful thing. And yet, everytime you see love visualised in images you see the same symbols and the same stale imagery. It gets to be very boring — to me at least. My try with this was to make an image about love that was not churned out by the Valentine’s Day marketing department, or by the Jilted Lovers Anarchist Cell. Is it romantic? No, probably not by most people’s standards. I do hope it is at least a little funny though and makes you smile.

Samir

With this, the fourth entry into Comic Konga, I’m practically on a roll. A major part of Vishal’s inspiration to start an event like this was to get people who are not regular practitioners into the flow of making comics. If you stick to it, I think Comic Konga succeeds in that very well.

Day 4: In Green Consumer Behaviour, our serial protagonist returns. I also return to multiple characters and dialogue with this one. I’m a fan of both the dialogue-based and the caption-centric single panel comic. I think they each have their charm, and one often works better than the other depending on the specific situation. I’m also exploring the medium a bit more and spreading my drawing wings by tackling more complex scenes. Staging is a lot of fun.

A pencil sketch on an A4 photocopy sheet was traced with a black finetip pen. The inks were scanned and vectorised in Inkscape. Blue tones and text were also applied in Inkscape.

I have tackled the issues of consumerism, consumer behaviour and the ever growing fad of green consumers in my writing before, but the topic is ever relevant and sometimes a single comic panel can communicate the situation as well, if not better, than long articles. Let’s face it, we’ve made a mess on this planet, and now a vast population of people think all of it can be undone purely my buying more stuff. Astounding!

Samir

The third entry into the latest Comic Konga event is here. A good sign since it’s one more than I managed to churn out the last time I took it on.

Day 3: Margin of Error, continues with my brown-paper-bag-robot character. He’s proven to be quite flexible and enjoyable so far and his further versatility remains to be explored as I put him through the paces in more situations. In addition to the repeat character, the other challenge I am taking on is to come up with only single panel comics. Like a short story, single panels are often more difficult to create than multi-panel narratives. This boiling down the point and the humour to it’s minimal essence can be a tough ask.

As always, the pencil sketch on an A4 photocopy sheet was traced with a black finetip pen. The inks were scanned and vectorised in Inkscape before applying the blue tones and text.

This comic is meant to be about progress, growth, development, and the illusion of these. Living in a world and an age when we consider everything to be advanced and forever advancing, it’s nice to sometimes question our measures of progress.

Samir

After a forced hiatus — I was out of town for a couple of days — my foray into Comic Konga continues.

Day 2: Sometimes You’re the Dog, Sometimes You’re the Stick, is a further exploration of the character that I came up with for my first try at the event. He seems to be a perfect innocent character that could be used to expose all manners of truth about the human condition, and our reactions to the world. At once an every-man and a marginalised observer, let me see if I can at least pull off the the requisite five Comic Konga pieces with the same protagonist. At the moment that is enough of a challenge. If I can do that greater plans can be considered.

The original pencil sketch was traced with a black finetip pen. The inks were scanned and vectorised in Inkscape before applying the blue tones and text.

This comic could be about dogs and sticks, or it might not be about dogs and sticks. That interpretation lies in the eyes of the beholder. I just know that it was fun image to draw and I always enjoy playing with the meanings of popular idioms.

Samir

Vishal recently announced the second Comic Konga. Five days of original comic content to be put up here seemed as good an excuse as any to get me cracking on some new material. So here goes with my first try called What is Philantropy Philanthropy. Like last time, I’m starting a day late, and it remains to be seen whether I will stick to the schedule, but I do hope to get further than before (only managaed 2).

Day 1: I really need to be drawing more often, rather than on such rare occasions, which lead me to try to come up with a recognizable character I could use for my illustrative endeavours. He doesn’t have a name yet (and not quite sure he should), but the little robot with the paper bag on his head has potential.

The original pencil sketch was traced with a black finetip pen. The inks were scanned and vectorised in Inkscape before applying the blue tones and text.

I would very much like to explore this character further. I think he could prove to be a useful asset when I need to express a one-off idea or opinion but don’t want to elaborate too much. Let the testing continue.

Hope you enjoy this slightly esoteric (philanthropic) first in what I would like to make a more regular performance in the future.

Samir

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