Dear readers,

Wish you a very prosperous, bright and Happy New Year

May this year bring cheer, joy and fulfilment in your life.

HAPPY 2008

ARTIZEN: Critiquing the critics

WHAT are the areas to see when you want to judge a piece of art or a piece of design?
Here are some critical points to consider before one ventures into art critiquing and they are very interesting and fun to know: First there is (A)Elements of Art and then (B) Principles of Design.
So, what are these elements of art? They are 1. Line, 2. Perspective, 3. Shape, 4. Colour and 5. Texture. Once you know these, your art critiquing process gets easier. I have seen many art critics committing the same mistake: they write about when the painter started his career, when and where his first exhibition was held and what paintings are on display at the current exhibition. But they simply miss out on the very subject of art, the description and depth of an artist’s paintings. Whenever you have these points at hand, start working on them, and it will be an amazing piece of work. Both the biography of the artist and his work of art are important.
Principles of Design includes: 1.Rhythm and Movement, 2. Balance, 3. Proportion, 4. Variety and Emphasis and 5. Unity or Proximity.
The first one is formative, the second one is descriptive. Some say that art critiquing process needs description, analysis, interpretation, judgment and creditline. But it’s entirely up to the critic to consider which points to emphasise once his subject is identified.

FONTASIA

Hi everyone,

I WANT to share with you something an aspiring designer needs to know. I had a casual chat with a magazine head who wanted to improve the design of his pages. It seemed to me that the head was not very proficient with the idea of designing, nor the designers who were making their pages had good colour sense. Sometimes it’s offending to see abrupt use of direct colours. It's better for magazines and supplements not use direct pinks and magentas and cyans. And some have been using age-old logos that look like government seals and stamps. In this post, you will find some solutions:

COLOURS: It's important not use DIRECT colours; a mix of TWO or THREE on the DARKER TONE is advisable. If you already have a colour palette made or a colour style prepared, just pick up your choicest colour. Spend some time to prepare a colour chart.

STORY LENGTH & DISPLAY: Two equal sized stories placed side by side everyday is most likely to spoil the display. It’s like a children’s design. Everyday, a page cannot look the same. In this case, working with varieties helps. One story (the lead) has to be at least bigger than another in preferably a 6 against 2 column display one day, and 5 against 3 another day.

PHOTOGRAPHS: Photographers are toiling on the field while a designer sits in an air-conditioned room spoiling their efforts by abruptly cutting pics and to rub a pinch of salt to their wound, by giving a byline. Cropping of photographs needs some technique. For readers too, an unmanaged cropping is offending. All designers should also have some sense of photography. Discuss with your photographers what kind of pictures will alleviate your page. The editor will not bar a designer from talking to the photographers. Good designers have always liaised with photographers and production department.

DESIGNING IN A HURRY: Again, keeping a colour palette ready and available at hand will definitely save the time. Maintaining a library of stock photographs also helps.

HORIZONTAL VS VERTICAL: Making best use of the page space, one can play with horizontal and vertical display even in intros, blurbs and headlines. Playing vertical against horizontal automatically improves a page.

LAST BUT NOT THE LEAST: Don’t take it seriously. Designing is fun. If you don’t enjoy designing, maybe it’s not your job.

Joy and celebration

HAPPY DIWALI
THIS Diwali, wish you prosperity and good health. Let us make a pledge on this occasion: Let our actions be driven by conscience and not tendencies. Let us learn how to respect environment and the greens, for they are the resources we need to make our living. Let us embrace one another in true friendship and bring cheers in everyone's heart.

Still Growing

GUWAHATI has become a big city. Sometimes I feel it may have already surpassed the size of Pune. Though, populationwise, Pune is a much bigger city. I have to go to Nagaon through Guwahati, there is no other option and I had never liked Guwahati some ten years back. And I used to lament the bad condition of its roads. Now, it’s a different scenario altogether: Wide, polished roads passing through Maligaon and Lokhra and big shopping complexes: a city rapidly changing and all spruced up particularly after the India-Indonesia-Thailand tour, the National Games and the Asian Athletics—all events happening one after another. For Guwahatians, it may sound a bit weird, I missed the floating restaurant experience as the water had receded in Brahmaputra this time around. And if I had an inkling that it would take two hours without any traffic jam to reach the passport office in Beltola from Maligaon, I would have hired a helicopter service, if I could. But I enjoyed the ride as the city bus service is really good. We should now have a sky train or metro to connect it from one end to another.

The leaves

My tribute to four Spanish masters

Hi everyone,
IT'S BEEN long time since I have posted anything on the blog.
Here is my small tribute to four Spanish masters.

Four Spanish Masters
Calatrava, I bow down to you,
For, someone said, “why is Taj Mahal a wonder”?
“Because it's wonderful”, I said.
If appreciations could express themselves,
they would dance around your majestic bridges
And make them look as simple as ‘wonder’.

One master has influenced Carlo’s canvas
And adorned Boccioni’s brush
For how does one adore you
If not with lines, shapes and lights, where words fail?

The king of guitar has awed all with his tunes,
The black magic woman itself succumbs in front of his
Lilting notes.

Neruda is not a man of charming chants
But his words of a mundane world has caused flutter
across the globe.

Four Spanish masters, whom I revere.
Their magic wands touched the frames;
All lifeless dull canvases sprang back to life.
.......................................

Hi all,
FIRST, let me be honest with myself. I am not a fan of Picasso. I personally find Gockel or Kandinsky better painters than Picasso. Maybe, because I love easy flow of the brush and not twists or angles or cubes. If I become an artist, I would not draw anything cubic or hard edges or anything futuristic. I would rather draw something easy and flowing, something very contemporary. Though I respect Picasso for he is an artist in his own right. If I ask you what is the most important monumental work of Picasso? You’ll definitely say, Guernica. Right? But what moves me the most is his work Violin Jolie Eva, 1912 and Girl in Front of a Mirror, 1932.
The first one is the best example of his experimentation with collage and assemblage, where simple art has become three dimensional and sculptural. In Girl in Front of a Mirror, we see the harmony and sensuality of colour and patterns. In this, there is not hard geometric pattern, but pure rhythmic flow. Many art critics see Picasso only as a proponent of Cubist art. Well, he does represent the genre of cubo-fururistic art, but if you closely view details of his arts segment-wise, you will see three main periods that gave birth to such wonderful works of art as Family of Acrobats with Ape, 1905 and Two Brothers, 1906, which I think have been largely ignored by art critics.
The first period is his experimentation with colours: Picasso’s Blue and Picasso’s Pink: a well-balanced colour composition with brilliant tones creating warm moods. The second period is experimentation with shapes, for which he is famous as a cubist painter. The surreal Picasso does not impress me as other such artists do. The third period is his work with rhythm and flow, which is visible in Girl in Front of a Mirror.
.......................................
I LOVE Neruda for the simplicity of his renderings and the mundane, down-to-earth voice that speaks as clearly and simply as never before.
“And it was at that age…Poetry arrived
In search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
It came from, from winter or a river.” ---- Poetry, from Isla Negra
Neruda’s words are simple, vivid, clear and there is no hidden aesthetics, it’s pure language for language’s sake.
“Then up the ladder of the earth I climbed
Through the barbed jungle’s thickets
Until I reached you Macchu Picchu” ---- The Heights of Macchu Picchu
He is very candid and there is no hypocrisy when he says “I loved her and sometimes she loved me too.” His love is not platonic and he is not worried about it.
.......................................
SANTIAGO Calatrava is perhaps the most revered architect in the world. I wish to see his masterpieces personally, and I don’t know when that will happen.
.......................................
I REVERE Santana for one or two of his musical pieces. Though I am not a great fan of rock music, I do love new age world music, semi-classical Indian and fusion. Those who have a little bit of taste of Indian music classes, must have known how rigorous Indian music is unlike its Western counterpart. For, we have a tradition of rich and varied music which is centuries old. I remember, my music teacher used to beat students with a wooden-ruler if any of them failed to perform or did not do the homework.

ROADSIDE BEAUTY

P.O.E.T.R.Y . L.O.U.N.G.E

I am happy because you live

I am happy because the sun shines,
I am happy because it rains,
I am happy because the other person is how he is,
I am happy because flowers bloom in the gardens I have seen,
And in the forests I haven't seen,
It does not matter whether I look at them or not,
I am happy that they are.
I am happy because right now

some people are walking on the street,
some people are working somewhere,

some children are playing in some country,
Someone is buying new clothes from a clothshop in distant China,
Some kids are romping and whistling

in some school in some country.
A salesman is negotiating somewhere in US,
A shop boy is placing the newly-ordered books

in his book store in some city in Australia,
It does not matter whether I look at them or not,
I am happy that they are.
There are forests in the world,

some I know and some I have not seen,
There are various plants, ferns, animals, birds in those forests,
some I know some I have not seen,
It does not matter any way, I am happy that they live.
I am happy that the oceans are flowing,

I am happy that clouds form rain.
I am happy that tomorrow will be a new day.

I do not want to manipulate anybody,
I am happy that things are the way they are.

FROM THE DESIGN DESK

STANDARD DESIGN
When your design does not carry texts, it's better to keep the subject at the centre.

CLASSIC LAYOUT: A STUDY IN DETAIL

Hi friends,

You have seen that the fonts used in a Classic layout is very different from the fonts used in either a meta or a contemporary layout. While in meta (which acually means 'beyond'), I have used very strong fonts and given an experimental digital distortion. In a Classic layout, designers have been successful in using ornamental fonts or fonts that are anywhere near them.

Check in detail the colour combination. I have experimented with absolute black with cool colour combination, since black is a negative colour, it goes well with both warm and cool colours.

Hey folks, isn't page designing wonderful and fascinating? It's as interesting as Twenty-20 cricket, I bet.

Bye for now.

CLASSIC LAYOUT

CONTEMPORARY LAYOUT

META DESIGN

COLOUR, DESIGN AND LAYOUT

ONE of the emerging trends in modern layout design is the use of unique combination of colour patterns in page-designing. “The most important thing to understand is that we never see colour in a vacuum; we perceive colour in relation to other colours, in an environment. When you choose a second colour you must first envision how that colour will enteract with the rest of your design” --Binns. In a different context, they could be called background and foreground.

Contemporary design has taken mainly two types of symmetry in magazines and newspapers: vertical and horizontal, and most others are a combination and permutation of these two. This is what I have observed: You could hardly find radial rendering in a page, while it has been effectively used in other media or other forms of art, such as textile design, carpettry, pottery, porcelain, discs, etc.

The same page can look absolutely different in different colours and layouts. It's not that only light colours make a better page or using too much of dark colour is “disgusting”. A design with too much of hue and value needs a better newsprint to effectively etch out details. The better the newsprint, the more visible the details. Secondly, don’t stick to lighter and darker part of a design. That is part of colour pattern for which the technical term is “value”, which can also be defined as “tone”.

Both light and dark can be used under different circumstances and page layout for a magazine is definitely going to be different from the layout of a website page.

I love to work with designs. Whenever I take a magazine in my hand, I go through the designs, layout, pictures and every detail of it, and I have observed that black and blue make perfect background colours for many designs, and many designers have agreed with that. Another colour for superb background is pantone mixed with chocolate brown. Dark heena green is also a perfect background colour depending on what is the foreground.

Easy Post

Hi friends, I have been receiving mails and calls asking me why comments coming to my blog are to be registered. I know the complications of this and the difficulties you may find and that's why I have now opened them for you, so that you can post your views even without being a registered member.

Digital painting: Series 1

CLAY MODEL

I started experimenting with clay when I was a student. The model of Adam and Eve was made sometime between 1998 and 1999. Before that I made several other models, some in wood and others in paper. Wood curving and sculpture are some finest examples of fine art. And how could I miss them?

Adam and Eve in Clay

Digital painting

THE FLOAT 2