The Pullover

images from The Pullover, a project that looks
at the varying levels of human empathy,
through the lens of self-induced abortions.

First attempt at animating with Aftereffects

The last course held in second year was Animation, wherein I learnt to animate using Adobe Aftereffects, a pretty cool and easy to use software. I spent a huge amount of time designing my characters and graphics, since I process hand-drawn images, but that was the fun part. Animating was stressful since I'm kinda slow. And whoa, the possibilities on this software are endless! Also, I have a bunch of geniuses for classmates, and i'm glad some of them continue to produce amazing animations.The soundtrack I picked was the first verse of Man of The Hour by Norah Jones.
Here's what went into My Cannibal Romance:

The Lady

The Man of The Hour or The One Who Eats Meat

cookie jars and skull candy

things suggestive of magic

tubs

kinives

food that didn't really make it to the animation

cooking pot with something green

octopie

Here's the final clip that I produced:

Or you can watch it here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA1aQr-Kn0U

Book Cover

This was an exercise in book cover design in my first year of design school, relating to the Cradle To Cradle design principle in the book
A Question of Design, by McDonough and Braungart. It's a shame I haven't read the book yet, it's very relevant to one of our dying causes of being environment saviours. Which. we. will. be. yes.
Meanwhile let's use some lithium ion and make some book covers.

The book project

A long long time ago, in the most unlikely place (my biology textbook) I found inspiration for a project based on crime and transgression. I read about the notorious Mary Mallon, better known to the west as Typhoid Mary. In her life, Mary Mallon was a passive carrier of Typhoid and of all the things she could be, she chose to be a domestic cook. Mary immigrated from Ireland to the USA where she cooked in several households killing 3 and infecting 50 people, and continued to live in denial of typhoid fever. So much so that she attacked authorities with a pitchfork when they came to take her for tests and trial. She was put in quarantine for 4 years and spent the last of her days in isolation.

In my first year at college, I found the opportunity to create a book (under the broad theme of Transgression)
about her. Thank you Mary Mallon, that touch of macabre was all I needed to get this project going. She led a deplorable life but left the world quite a legend to tell. I tried to make the chronicles of Mary Mallon, something she may have recorded her life in while in quarantine, so I tried to use material she may have found around her. I consider myself lucky, I had the coolest teacher guide me through this.

Into my project went - tea stained gauze bandages,
antiseptic liquid (for the odour and the colour),
dyed fingernails (for effects and cheap thrills),
fake letters from US authorities with attempts to reproduce seals,
stab binding (I fell in instant love, thank you youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUD0iKBkCVo)
and hand-written Baskerville Old Face (Blissfulvilley Owsome Font with a history)
and lots of sinister little touches.

Here are a few pictures of what it looked like in the end. Some day  I'll document it better: 

Should get a picture of the fingernails.

Illustrations

Here's the work produced in the Illustration for Communication course,held recently in collefe. We used water colours and things! Such a welcome change in the classroom from laptop screens. Given to us was a word/phrase to root our illustration in.

Stuff I learnt and MUST remember next time:

 there no such thing as coming to class over-equipped, always get more material,
even if the seams of your bag say otherwise.

The light tables in college are mighty useful, yes they are, how was I not a fan before?

Always leave room around your illustration, don't frame in rectangles/squares,
chances are they will be cropped to be accommodated in
all sorts of shapes. Give them the versatility to be allowed that.

If working in more than one colour, use enough contrast.
What if the image were to be published in greyscale/ black and white?
The individual grey values will stand out only if there's ample contrast.

Have to learn to work with more than one colour. Heck, learn to use colour!
Once in a while, i should try going crazy with vibrance, there's a spectrum at my disposal.

Secret 
halftone-graphite

Secret
line in ink

Secret
silhouette in pencil

Secret
pen and water colour

Secret
pen and water colour

Work
grey pen and water colour

Apne Mouh Miyaa Mitthu
acrylic and tempera on paper

That parrot was the brightest thing I've made in a long long while.
My parents are glad I haven't gone absolutely de-saturate in life.
And the other day I wore red pants..maybe there's hope for people like me in the world.

the tall tails of tomorrow - part 2

Once we spent a good amount of time at Devanahalli and spoke to people from the many backgrounds that make up its puzzling lanes, we got down to creating a way to document these conversations and observations.  The book The Tall Tails of Tomorrow looks at the possibility of animals in folklore and becoming a fictional element for young readers as the urban kid finds himself becoming more and more remote from a life with animal husbandry and interaction with animals. It plays with small excerpts from animals in folklore and their modern juxtaposition. Scroll down to check out some illustrations that went into the book that I used to record the stories I found in Devanahalli-

(or click here for the book- http://issuu.com/malvikatewari/docs/thetalltailsoftomorrow?mode=window&backgroundColor=%23222222)

this gecko didn't make it to the book but it's kinda fun
hoping it'll shoot out a tongue someday

Figuring out how to draw monkeys took me a while..
it was the upward turn of the nostril.
 Then I realized that's the thing about certain people
that makes them monkeylike.

this dude here didn't make it either

nor did he, but i could use more of the
exaggerated limbs

nope. wha-at..?

those hands spell mischief to me

the old wise monkey 

and the stealthy little one

Then there were cows,

ek guy

do guy

short-of-space-in-the-metro-guy

bored-take-its-time-to-cross-the-road-guy

the warning look wali guy

sabhya, bechaari bharatiya village belle guy

little brass bell guy

give-up-and-take-a-snack-guy

and funny camels

and a tortoise

and a fortune teller !

Click below to view the book:

                                                 Open publication - Free publishing - More animals

Or you can visit this link:

http://issuu.com/malvikatewari/docs/thetalltailsoftomorrow?mode=window&backgroundColor=%23222222

(Note: The date on the last page is written incorrectly, it's supposed to be 3rd March 2011)

Thank you for reading. No animals were harmed in the making of this book. 

                                    Though a lot were shamelessly stared at and disgracefully drawn.

the tall tails of tomorrow - part 1

There's much that is left unmapped as a city evolves, one could say as the city develops, but that's way too optimistic a stand. I was introduced to the crazy pace at which local history and practices become obsolete with the changing city in a course in my second year of Design called the Evolution of Bangalore.

Under the guidance of some really cool facilitators who know their stuff, we were able to learn the gravity of what the Peri Urban faces as Urban kingdoms raze down their fortress walls and expand into fields that sustain their growing numbers. After several weeks of study and research that touched the very surface of Economics, Urban Planning, Policy Making, talking to and visiting the peri urban population of Devanahalli, we tried to document the changes this town faced due to the building of the New Bangalore International Airport.

Now we're no Sociologists, and we tried our hand at what we know, but I think that my classmates created some remarkable projects, from mapping on textiles to exploiting the extremes of Flash and (believe it or not) Powerpoint to make animations, even 8 bit games to record some ways in which the peri urban is evolving.

For my part, I made a book called the Tall Tails of Tomorrow. But first, here's a look at Devanahalli...

An ancient residence at Devanahalli

I'd never seen Hanuman depicted this way

Devanahalli happens to be the birthplace of Tipu Sultan
and this cool fort which soon proposes to get a flock of
tourists with the New Airport in the vicinity

Vijipura, a peri urban town next to Devanahalli is home to several sericulture (silk producing) units.

We saw the process of acquiring silk from silk worm cocoon.

First the cocoons are auctioned in a warehouse, the two varieties present were the local silk worm cocoons that were ivory and  the temperate Chinese cocoons, more sensitive to change of weather and much whiter. The price depends on the demand and the quality of cocoons which in turn affects the livelihood of the mulberry farmer and his next yield. 

In suffocatingly small workshops, the cocoons are boiled
and the fine silk thread is drawn and reeled onto
huge spinning wheels.A slightly sorry sight.

The spun silk is then polished and reeled mechanically.
The sheen is brilliant.
I wish they were never dyed.

See what I mean?

After it's chemically dyed, it looks like this.

The cocoon boilers and the dyers use
firewood  to fuel the boiling water.
Dyeing consumes a lot of water which is
 why they insist on taking huge orders.

Finally, the silk reaches a loom.
Here we can see the template of the loom
of a traditional silk saree.

The pattern code is all very binary, at each point
across a given stretch of the warp
it either weaves or it doesn't.

That's what the result looks like, a South Silk Saree.

That's the gentleman who weaves silk sarees
at this cottage industry. Its a severely tasking
job, we saw it for ourselves.The effort that
goes into creating a silk saree is
beyond monetary measure.

The sad story of the silk sarees of Vijipura is the quick pace at which mechanization is taking over the handlooms and its workers and how the prevalent weather changes are affecting the cocoons. A few weeks after visiting Devanahalli, I came across a news article addressing the drop in market rates for Bangalore silk on account of silk from abroad made cheaper and how people have a preference for cheaper synthetic polymers. This drove several workers of the sericulture industry to commit suicide. One could feel sorry for the silk moth, which is a beautiful creature - I saw them hatch at a friend's place, or for the industry. But the sad truth for sericulture workers, like the cotton farmers at Wardha, is their helpless situation that is ruled by market trends and the changes that the Urban imposes on them.

This is just one of the many changes we observed at Devanahalli that we felt needed recording.