This is my last post here!

I've finally taken the leap and moved over to my new blog home, www.fidgetyfeets.tumblr.com

I also have a page for my professional work, www.behance.net/manasiparikh

Thanks for stopping by here, and for all the love over the years :) 

Ta! 

Calendar 2013

A calendar whipped up with much love by all the designers who work with Chumbak. I did January and July, and was lucky to get to design the cover page as well!

January wishes you a Happy New Ear, while the invisible thought bubble in Indra's head in July says "So, would julylaike some rain this month?"

Get it? Hahaha :P

Also, someone who bought the calendar was sweet enough to share a picture of it with us! It made me happy to see my drawing up on someone's board :) 

Katha Coverpage

An overnight job for the book mentioned in the post below. Managed to meet the deadline with a little help from my friend KC. I hope the kids who wrote stories for the book liked what we whipped up! 

Ramdhan's Flue

So here's a silly story. I drew these illustrations over a year ago for Katha as a part of a publication which compiled short stories written by school kids. The idea of illustrating a story written by a child sounded like so much fun. I wondered how close my drawings be to what the child pictured in his head. What would the child think when he saw my illustrations? Would he like them? What kind of a person would he picture me to be? Would I meet the child someday and talk about the story? It was all very exciting. So when Katha sent in a bunch of stories for me to pick from, I read each one with a lot of interest and finally picked one called Ramdhan's Flute, purely because I was plain impressed by the intellect of the child who'd written it! The choice of words, the pacing of the story, the thought behind the story was all very clever and in my head I was rather honoured to be drawing for this little kid.

All this, only to realise much later that the story had been pulled out of the second edition of the book because someone reported plagiarism. My first set of published illustrations yanked out of the book because the silly little kid copied a story to probably better it's chances of getting published. I want to pinch the child's ear and shove a small scolding into his head. Not because he copied a story. Not because my illustrations didn't get published. But because he didn't write a story of his own.

PS : Notice how the world child is so casually thrown around by someone who's now getting rather comfortable with her twenties. Twenty four to be precise. *Sigh*

BnBnBnBnBnBnBnBnBnBnB!

The drawing in my previous post reminded me of this, so thought I'd put it up! So Chumbak is where I currently work. It's been six months since I joined them in Bangalore, and it's been quite a mad ride so far. Now that I've decided to blog more often, you'll see little nuggets of work and daily nonsense from Chumbak pop up on my blog every now and then :) This particular sketch was made for a giveaway mug for the first ever Brainstorming and Beer session Chumbak held with all it's designers to plan out their design scene for the next quarter. It was so much much fun, the session as well as scribbling this out! Especially because it's a lot of my favourite people on a mug :)

Also, while I'm on this post, a big shout out to Kaveri Goplakrishnan (The girl peppering her brain in the sketch) for general madness over the past five months. I dunno how I'd have managed without her at work! Here's to frustrated airdrop sketches, venting in the autos, daily giggles, 8tracks, stupidity, disgusting food habits, everyday stories, matching curtains, anthuriums, picking up kittens off the roads, purple turtles and the awesome mood lamps we shall both someday own.

And toasting to that, I end this post on cheery-beer-ey note. 

Joy

My room in my new house in Bangalore, and a Sunday well spent :) 

Ghar snippets

I thought it would be apt to start with this as a continuation of my last post of over a year ago. Here are a few snippets of animation I did for my grad film, Ghar. I didn't end up working on it post graduation, and I died a little today when I found this lying in my hardisk all rusty and unfinished :( If you ask why,  I'd say I've busy with Bechain Nagri. But the real reason is I didn't have the confidence to pull off an inde film all by myself. My set of storytelling, drawing and animating skills were in my head never enough to do justice to the story I was out to tell, and each time I'd sit to work on the film I'd keep holding myself back. Designing that character just once again, for the two hundredth and third time..maybe it would come out perfect this time?

I feel so silly thinking like that in retrospect. I wish I'd just finished the damn thing. These days, I try my best make sure I finish what I start. And and I do wish I can also finish making Ghar some day! 

I've been away,

but I'm going to be back really soon :) 

The reason this space hasn't been updated for over a year is a long rambling wambling story full of happysadbadgoodanduglymysterioussinisterandsecret things, which I shall narrate in little bits over the next few posts. But until then, I have no words to tell you how happy I am to be back here! Ok, very happy :) Also, I'm in a really good mood because I drew and drew all day without anyone breathing deadlines, excel sheets and opinions down my neck. I love drawing and it makes me happier than anything else in the world. Except of course if I would suddenly and overnight become a singing-dancing prodigy. THAT would make me delirious. That day will come, I'm telling you. But until then, imma gonna get back to my good old drawing board. Goodnight yo! And see y'all soon. 

Treatment tryouts for Ghar

On a sidenote, I convocated earlier this week :)

Ghar!

Hi blog! I know I've been really boring, no new posts in a really long time. I'll try posting here more often. I've been super caught up working on my diploma film, which it's just SO much work, but work I love doing :) The picture above is a mood board for my film. My film's called Ghar (Home) and is finally taking shape. I'm so excited to see it finished! Will post animation line tests and other snippets from the film as and when they get done. All feedback welcome! 

Bechain Books

And yet another Bechain Nagri post :P

I've been yabbarelling so much about Bechain Nagri in the past couple of posts, that I really should take this one as an excuse to tell you about it.

You know we're way past our graduation year right? teeheee, having taken up ambitious diploma projects that spilled into an whole extra year (and counting), me and a bunch of friends bid our goodbyes to hostel life and now live in a rented apartment close to campus. And if you've had to call your papa in the beginning of every month screeching 'papppaaaaa...account mein paisa dalo!', and if you've also been a big fat 22 year old something while doing this, you'll understand just how hard it is to make that damn call.

Sniff!

Anyway, but really, it was time we did something to pay our own electricity bills! And while that remains an excuse, we really wanted to have some fun and have something else to look forward to while working on our short films.

We love sketchbooks, and we love drawing, so we combined the two and made these really nice open spine sketchbooks with illustrated covers and launched them at our college fest, RGB. You can see pictures of those madness filled days here.

The prints to the left are my set of prints. They're drawings done on photographs I'd clicked on a trip to Rajasthan earlier this year. I really like photographs, quaint and empty spaces, and doodling. I enjoyed doing this series because I could throw all of it in.

The pixellated design at the bottom of the pile is on it's way! If you like what you see here, do join our facebook page and we'll keep you updated :)

RGB Tees!

More tees :)

I designed this series for NID's intercollege design fest, RGB: Share.Design.Play.


Here's what they're called :


1) Share Your Jalebees
2) Design Fake Beemaries
3) Play Colourful Holies

*grin*

So this year we celebrated desi design, the entire feel of the fest being very local, colourful, kitschy...and the juniors did a rather good job of peppering the campus with lifesize carrom boards, Rajnikant, and jhintak truck graphics.

I had total fun figuring the word play for this lot. Also, the entire desi thing went perfect with the idea, so llaalalaaaa!

Also, it was fun to have second round of tees printed this year :)

The character drawings are done by my friend Kc (who should be crunched under a sumo wrestlers butt for not updating his blog!)

So that's that! I wish I'd thought of taking pictures of people wearing the tees, but I forgot :P

EDI tee

My first t-shirt print ever !!

I made this for a friend, who studied at the Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India. His batch graduated this year, and wanted a batch tee as a keepsake.

So here are the designs of the front and the back, and then the entire bunch of EDI-ots wearing them at the bottom.

Don't ask me how a tower of hairy elephants found their way on a seriousass entrepreneurship tee :P

I do hope it works better than caricatures of Mallya, Tata, Birla and other fancy honchos they wanted me to stamp on the tee, something I vigorously shook my head in the negative to before they even finished their sentence.

I love thinking in characters. That's why I love animation and animation people :) There's always fun to look forward to!

Nandini

Sudha

Threadless!

I just entered my first submission for threadless loves patterns challenge :)

girgit

 ok, so i'm being cheap and posting a birthday card i splashed up for a friend who's party i couldn't attend. he's a part of a studio called girgit (chameleon) and in some unexplainable way looks like the dude on the rainbow. it's been a reeeeaaly long time since i played around with watercolours, and by doing this instant card today reminded me of just how much i love watercolours!

ps: i just kinda realised, isn't it funny how this guy, and the elephant and gandhi in my previous two posts share the same grin? o_O note to self : draw. sad. people. from. time. to. time. angry shall also do, occasionally. 

Yellephaant!

this is the artist note that's going to be there in all the books i've made for bechain nagri!

there's substantial explanation i need to give before i talk like 'bechain nagri' has been in the dictionary for years and assume you know exactly what it means. i will, sometime, soon, promise.

oh.my.god.i'm.writing.a.blog.post.

eeeeeeeeee! this place feels alien. this..this..ACT.feels.alien. THIS act of writing a blog post. it's been 223434888389f89jkfdo9u2394u594884848843oo3o332299 seconds since my last post no? i'm sorry, i've been spending too much time in the inside of my head. i've been keeping busy with two big things. my diploma film (i'll post something soon!) and bechain nagri (click click click), which along with tiresomeness and insane amounts of brain churning, has also been lots of fun! i made the above illustration for rejoicing the 500 likes we got on facebook today.

people were weird about me posting this saying 'beware, it might be offensive.' i really think indians should learn to laugh at themselves. there are lots of things in india i'd like to change. but that'll be another post..sometime. but i think our country is awesome.

i don't even know what to write. hmm..sssso. what all has happened since november 24th 2010? hmm. lets see. got rabbits (the ones that eat paper, and have special taste for my roald dahl books). got a new flatmate. launched bechain nagri. made tshirts that got printed! read a few books on entrepreneurship. had some madass parties. animated. learnt to cook reasonably. GOT GIFTED A MACBOOK PRO :D made a lot of trips to bombay. travelled to udaipur. read the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. danced like never before. got one haircut. rollerbladed. grew some perspective plants. made considerable progress in diploma film. converted one room in our house to a studiospace. wrote a lot of blogposts in my head. and forgot all about them. *grumble*

annnyyway. i should get myself to sleep. i'm going to share some stuff from my diploma film soon. and i will post more often now on. i have a mac and 24*7 internet connection. i should not be allowed to make excuses for not updating my blog.

also, my adopted brother has a blog. you'll find it at www.dredmystic.blogspot.com, check it out! he makes good stuff, sometimes :P



I'm documenting my diploma film, Ghar. It's not even made yet, and I'm documenting it. I detest institute formalities that require me to do this! Anyhow, while I'm at it anyway, thought I'd have some fun. The illustration is for the intro page, the doodle me will be jumping across pages expelling speech bubble blabber wherever required.