Lady Gaga won an Oscar for “Shallow” from “A Star is Born,” a romantic music-drama. As a visual person, I react more to what I see than to what I hear, and so…
You can read the original Gaga Post here.
Lady Gaga and the Spider Colony!
This Gallery Update was pending for some time, and while I still haven’t been able to put together the icons for my graphite and pen-ink artworks, I got the icons of the painted artworks together to update the gallery.
I am reproducing the updated part of the gallery here – just in case, you are a kindred (read: lazy) soul.
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| Mike Ross – Asa Hutchinson TBP Arkansas |
Jeff Bezos CEO – Amazon |
Jimmy Fallon Host – The Tonight Show |
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| Selena Gomez Singer/Actor |
Malcolm Gladwell Author: The Tipping Point |
Serena Williams Tennis Star |
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| Pat & Babs Characters in a Novel |
Mark Pryor vs. Tom Cotton TBP – Arkansas |
Gandalf the Grey Lord of the Rings |
I’d love to mention how the post that I did on Nude Celebrity Pictures has been getting all the attention. I think a new caricature genre with nudes as its central theme could become quite popular, only if someone had the talent and the will to pursue it. The fact that I am sharing this priceless idea so openly with you, must tell you that I’ve decided that my caricatures stay clothed and dignified.
Before I make this post, I’ve got to ask you something? Do you want to make caricatures? (Note that I am not asking you whether you’d like to draw caricatures.) Click the following sticker to find out more about my caricaturing app “Toonsie Roll”, which is going to be in the App Store soon 🙂
That’s all for now 🙂
There’s no denying that Ebola‘s accelerating spread is a huge concern for humanity, and yet, there’s another virus in the air, one that’s been multiplying at a rate that is exponentially greater than that of Ebola. It’s called the Celebrity Nudes Virus (CNV).
According to CBS*,
The Celebrity Nudes Virus has by now spread to all the countries of the world, and the number of people infected by this virus doubles every hour. Accordingly to statistics that have been laboriously collected, classified and sifted, every man infected by this virus can potentially infect 6 others, in a matter of seconds. It has also been reported that 5 out of 6 people who get infected, are males.
The man who unleashed this virus on the Internet claims that he did it for money. And yet, the poor devil, the man with a zillion dreams of a billion dollars got a measly $120 for his labors…and if we should believe him…for his investment.
This man, who CBS* has nicknamed “Father of the Celeb-nude Virus” has hacked into the iCloud accounts of 100 celebrities, including Rihanna, Kristen Dunst, and Selena Gomez, and despite the financial setback, he has no intentions of stopping. “The FBI,” he says, “is a minor inconvenience.”
Following are some of the search-strings that the infected group of people have so creatively come up with.
Search terms such as these abound, despite the celebrities issuing statements on moral grounds. They’ve been condemning people who view these leaked pictures as participating thieves, because they are viewing stolen goods. CBS* spokeswoman Shafali says:
“I understand their concern. Hacking nude celebrity pictures is akin to plagiarism in the art/literary circles. The person who created the content must be fairly compensated for its use. Now that those nudes are already out there, nobody is going to want to pay to view them – so what could’ve been on the front-page of Rolling Stone or GQ and would’ve justly made the celebs and their retinues some moolah, has now resulted in $1.20 per celeb for the hacker. It’s terribly unfair to the celebrities, I suppose; but what hurts me more, is the erosion of the value of those pictures, which in fact, is also an insult to the celebrities in question.”
Most celebrities aren’t ticked off because their nudes went online – they’d love to have those pictures on the covers or the center-spreads of magazines. Just click the following link to view some nude celebrity pictures that have been shared with totally value-driven willingness, and hence puts the viewer on the right side of the ethics debate. In fact, the latest celeb to go nude for GQ is Kim Kardashian!
(No prizes for guessing the right answer.)
The Celebrity Nudes Virus is indubitably more contagious of the two viruses. Even Google works faster to find Celeb Nude Photos than it does to find pages that talk about Ebola. Please check the encircled statistics.
I rest my case.
In another, unrelated, unsourced news byte, CBS* has come under heavy criticism for attempting to milk the celebrity nudes scandal for their blog. The CBS spokeswoman made the following statement:
“We are in the business of creating caricatures and exaggerating deviations. We believe that the ridiculousness of the celebrity nude pictures hacking scandal has to be recorded for posterity. We are just a tiny spoke, a small blog in the scandal-mongering hinterlands of the World Wide Web. We believe that we are doing the right thing.”
CBS*: Caricatures by Shafali
Have you ever seen them together? In the same place? This has never happened before! But now it will. Now you will see them together here – at this caricaturist’s blog!
Keeping this post short 🙂 Got to get back to sketching a very interesting scene for a magazine-spread. I need a cup of tea before I start…
This caricature of Selena Gomez is one of my recent creations. It’s part of a poster collection that I am working on.
Actual Size: 12 inches by 18 inches.
Digital painting is quite like oil-painting or color-pencil painting (an odd term to use but when you look at the stuff artists create with color-pencils, painting is the only term that really does justice to the magnificent works they produce.)
So what do I mean when I say Digital Painting is like any other painting?
Simply speaking…
There was a time when I fretted about brushes – which to use for which purpose; but then decided that it was too confusing and so I now paint the whole image with one brush – it’s a natural brush that ships with Photoshop – and I just change the brush-sizes, which is pretty easy to do if you paint in Photoshop. If you use a tablet, program your strip to “[” for reducing the size and “]” for increasing it; or just push the corresponding keys on the keyboard.
Here are three important stages of Selena’s Caricature.
I begin with a sketch. I always do; and that’s how I think it should be done – mainly because a sketch allows you to fix the important mistakes before you carry them over in the final work. It’s about risking 15 minutes of work vis-a-vis risking a couple of days worth of effort, so the decision is actually a no-brainer.
The sketch stage is where I stretch and squeeze her features to make her face look funny. I am not a distortionist, which means I exaggerate only to increase the funniness quotient of the image. In my opinion, a caricaturist must not just exaggerate certain features of a face, but to also exaggerate the main element of the subject’s personality. A strong man should look stronger, a haughty person, haughtier; a shabby person should look shabbier, and a cute woman, cuter. The last bit applies to Selena’s caricature. (“Evolution of a Caricaturist – How to Draw Caricatures” explains how a person’s features impact the overall impression cast by the person. The book also discusses Neoteny (that specific quality of the facial features that helps them make a face look child-like,) and describes how a feature must be exaggerated to enhance/reduce neoteny.)
Her hair, especially her ponytail in this image, makes her look cuter…or in other words, younger and childlike. Caricaturing her ponytail made sense to me, as she’s an icon for kids. Her eyes are rather small. Small eyes aren’t considered beautiful on a grownup woman’s face, but they do their part in making her look younger. When I did this caricature-portrait, I was asked why I didn’t caricature her frontal assets more. It’s almost a habit among caricaturists to make their women subjects look exceptionally well-endowed – frontally as well as dorsally. (I plead guilty of doing it once – but the subject was Pamela Anderson, whose silicon-enhanced, almost spherical assets have been the subject of much speculation and mirth. I only did it because it was Ms. Pamela Anderson, and her Pancho and Lefty really deserved to be noted.) In the case of Selena, such exaggeration would destroy the young and innocent look that I was trying to achieve.
As you can see, the sketch is fairly basic. In fact, it was done right there in Photoshop…and it didn’t take a lot of time. Until a couple of years ago, I used to sketch on paper, then scan the sketch and import it into Photoshop. I did this for years…but in the recent years, I’ve found myself doing a lot of my base-sketches (that I use as a base for painting) in Photoshop. It’s cleaner and quicker (changes can be made easily and you don’t need to waste your time scanning the sketches in)…so while I still draw a lot on paper, especially when the final artwork has to be done by hand; for my digital paintings, I now prefer a digital sketch.
The intermediate image that you see here, presents the color-coding. I’ve added the colors to the image and have tried to ensure that the light and dark colors are put where they belong. At this point, I am still focused on the face (neck-below it’s still an almost solid expanse.) The brush size is rather large and you can see the paint-strokes clearly. The eyes are almost done (I always sketch and paint the eyes first.) I chose a light background (specifically the sky/emerald blue combination) because it further reinforces the child/girl factor in the artwork. The sequined dress that she would wear in the final image, can merely be seen as a shadow in this image. At this point, I was struggling with the idea of leaving the dress out – too much of work, I thought. But then I caved in to the desire of making her look like a princess.
The final image was the result of a lot of work and ended with my right wrist refusing to bend – it had been in the same position for almost the entire duration of the painting process – poised on the keyboard, helping me use the shortcuts. I am sure that art-schools have a special class on how to avoid the carpal tunnel syndrome.
I really don’t have a lot to say for the final look – except that the hair took a lot of time, so did the dress (on a different note – why women wear terrible dresses with bells and shells sewn on them?) I added finishing touches to the eyes, the nose, the teeth, the neck too…but that was the easier part. As you can see…the sketch makes her look a lot younger, but after I watched her recent video, I thought that it would be a good idea to introduce a little maturity to the face (slight squaring of the jaw-line and the slightly naughty look in her eyes.) Finally, my reviewer OKed it and signed the proverbial release form.
Here’s a closeup of the eyes:
Here’s a shorter version of an already short biography of a very young Selena Gomez.
The actor-singer was born in 1992 in Texas, and she did her first role in Barney and Friends, a television serial, when she was just ten. Her first film was Spy Kids 3D: Gameover in which she did a cameo. She also appeared as Mikayla in three episodes of Disney’s serial Hannah Montana, but her real success came from her role in Wizards of Waverly Place, after which she was also compared with the now incomparable Miley Cyrus.
Somewhere around 2009, Gomez began focusing on music in which she got her first major success in 2010 with the song “Tell me Something I don’t know.” The last four years have been a very busy time for Selena.
On the Personal Front:
Selena Gomez’s dad was a Mexican. While the details of her arrival in the US evade me, she has herself confessed of her fears and wondered what would’ve become of her, if she had remained in Mexico. (It made me wonder too…) Her dad had left her mom and her mom struggled to meet the expenses of the household. (I’ve repeated this story so often that I now wonder if there are many in Hollywood who come from a two-parent family.)
Random Bits:
Currently…
Her Solo Debut Album “Stars Dance” has been doing well. Her single “Come and Get it,” became a top 10 hit and this is why I thought that the poster must mention it.
I know that each time I disappear, you think Atlantis, but this time it wasn’t Atlantis that pulled me away – it was India.
So, here’s a collection of all Indian Caricatures, Portraits, and Drawings that’ve appeared on this blog so far (almost – unless I missed a couple.)
More later 🙂
Every couple of months, I look at the searches that bring visitors to my blog, and being the unfeeling brute of a caricaturist that I am, I end up ridiculing the ones that I don’t understand. It’s the classic case of the fox that ended up ridiculing the grapes that she couldn’t reach. So, here I go…
vrrrrroooooom….
I thought there were four-types – Starving, Dying, Dead, and Rich, and so I wrote about them. While some readers thought that my classification was dead-right, a few felt that I was one bitter artist with tons of venom inside me. Now if a caricaturist didn’t ridicule stuff, who would? President Obama or Chancellor Merkel? So if you are looking for The 4-Types of Artists and you have the ability to digest the venom that I’ve spewed in this book, go ahead, download it Free and wonder why you ever decided to play the high-risk game of becoming an artist.
Click to download in a format of your choice.
I am not sure I know what you are looking for. The psychological Analysis of Mr. Holmes himself, or the methods of psychological analysis employed by Mr. Holmes. I can help you with the first, but not with the second. I think Mr. Holmes was an artist with a scientific mind, quite like his creator. (Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle was a writer who was a doctor.) Perhaps Dr. Doyle created Mr. Holmes with a missing corpus callosum and so his equally powerful brain-halves were always in sync. While his right brain made him intuitive, creative, and musical; his left brain made him logical and analytical. Together, his abilities and his idiosyncrasies transformed him into a social disaster.
But then you could’ve been looking for the psycho-analytical methods that Mr. Holmes used to solve his cases. If so, I’d recommend that you gave up the search. It isn’t easy to decipher crazy geniuses, especially of the fictional kind…and even when you succeed, you’ll not have Dr. Watson building real-life situations around your incredible talent and impeccable methods.
Mr. Holmes….
I think there’s a demand for a cross of Vlad the impaler and Voldemort (Oops! I named him – I named You Know Who! But wait…isn’t he dead already? I think he died in the seventh book of the Harry Potter Series. Oh God! I’ve lived in that world for so many years that I can’t bring myself to believe that Voldemort’s horcruxes were destroyed by forever-wronged yet forever-loved Harry Potter!)
Let me not meander. If you are a writer hoping to make it big one day, here’s the idea of the decade. There’s this villain who is as evil as they get (Vlad and Voldemort rolled into one) and there’s this sweet young guy or girl carrying the responsibility of ridding this world of evil. Once you are done writing and then done getting it to the agents, and then done getting agents to reading it, and then done with a publisher publishing it, and then done getting it famous – I promise to caricature your villain Vladimort and present him on this blog. In the meantime, I’ll stick with the heroes. Here’s young Mr. Potter for you 🙂
Thanks for the reminder. I’ve been thinking of drawing Salman Khan’s caricature for the last two years, but I haven’t gotten around to actually making it. In these years, Salman Khan has been doing his best to make me dislike him. He’s called women younger than him “Aunty” (all because they don’t gym-out five-days a week as there lives don’t revolve around biceps, six-packs, and washboard stomachs,) and he has trashed Vivek Oberoi’s career (because his ex-girlfriend Aishwarya used Vivek as a bait)! I can understand “accidents” and “impulse-actions” but I can’t understand studied malice. So, Salman’s Caricature still appears at the bottom of this Caricaturist’s To-Do list.
Interesting!
Dear Searcher, do you realize that you are looking for one guy and not two? Adam is Satan…and every once in a while Eve too is. Satan doesn’t live outside of us, nor does God. They live within us. God pulls us towards good and Satan towards evil. When Satan begins to dominate Adam, you get a James Holmes, an Adam Lanza, a Ted Bundy…and of course, an Adolf Hitler!
Sigmund Freud’s Cartoon must definitely dream for if it didn’t, how would Freud go about analyzing those dreams. Freud’s caricature is one of my favorites. Check it out here.
I know what you are thinking.
I love these, and thank you for searching 🙂
Thanks for the idea. I’ll make one 🙂
Don’t. Don’t learn to caricature like anyone. Learn to caricature and develop your own style and methods. Study the methods employed by the Greats, but don’t caricature like they did. Why? Well, for two simple reasons. 1. You’ll deviate from the way you draw and paint – you’ll change your natural style and end up with a contrived style…and be assured – contrived styles look contrived – they never look natural. 2. People will look at your work and see the reflection of Mario Miranda’s work or Ajit Ninan’s or even Uderzo’s!
So, learn to caricature. Period. 🙂
Here are the caricatures of Mario Miranda and Ajit Ninan, caricatured like Shafali 🙂
Mario Miranda (1926 – 2011) with his characters.
Check out my avatar 🙂
Oh yeah! Cute Husband with Nagging Wife! This search smacks of chauvinism, it reeks of gender-bias, it…it…it makes me gnash my teeth and sharpen my claws; it makes me want to sketch a cute wife and a nagging husband – just to spite every chauvinist out there!
She is indeed the Titanic Merkel, isn’t she?
She’s also Merkel the Dragon-slayer!
???
I am sure this has a deep meaning. I just don’t know what. Let me try.
No?!
No?!
It could be…
OK. I give up. I’ll stay with the love-message interpretation, then. Now let me check if I’m Mensa Material.
Thanks folks. You were looking for my caricatures and you reached the right place. You’ve been my top-searchers for the last quarter and I really, truly appreciate that my caricatures have been the objects of your attention.
I appreciate your visits. Keep visiting – even though I may pick your search term and caricature it 🙂
Mr. Keith Richards (the guitar-strumming, auto-biography writing rock-star, who has inspired many caricaturists to push their wrinkle-painting abilities beyond safe-limits,) hypnotized this caricaturist and ensured that his was the first caricature I made. I just fell for his deep and mysterious wrinkles, his beautiful red bandana, his long silky tresses, his skull-ring, and… that cigarette swinging from his lips.I couldn’t have painted anyone else until I had painted him. His awesomeness consumed me…totally and completely.
(Statutory Warning: Cigarette-smoking is injurious to health. Viewing images of people smoking cigarettes could result in tertiary-smoking. It’s recommended that you visualize a daisy hanging from Mr. Richards’ lips while viewing the following caricature.)
OK. So, here’s his caricature. This will tell you why I flipped.
About Keith Richards:
He’s considered to be one of the best (4th to be precise, according to this Wikipedia page on him,) guitarists of the world. He is one of the founding members of the rock band The Rolling Stones (same band to which Mick Jagger belongs. Their lines look similar, don’t they?) Richards found his way into this article “Rock and Roll is (Mostly) Noise Pollution” because he too wrote his Autobiography “Life“. (If you are wondering…the title of the article spoofs “Rock and Roll ain’t Noise Pollution” by AC/DC.)
What I loved Drawing?
Actually…everything! More specifically, his hair, his bandana, his face, his guitar, his cigarette…and my little mouse-friend. Did you notice him?
About the Colors?
When you paint rock-stars, you don’t have to worry a lot about colors 🙂 They supply the colors themselves.
If you’ve known this caricaturist for a while, you know that when left to her own devices, she picks up a pencil and draws black-and-white caricatures. She then expects people to swoon over her black and white drawings, conveniently forgetting that the world loves colors. (She obviously won’t let go of this opportunity to compare herself with the Great Mr. Henry Ford who was happy making black cars, telling people that they could have any color as long as it was black.)
So when on February 5th, she opened her mailbox to find an email from the American Spectator, asking her to paint the color-caricatures of three famous rock stars of the twentieth century, she looked at the deadline and moaned. Three color caricatures in five-and-a-half days…and of rock-stars (I am tone-deaf, remember?)
The good news is – I did it 🙂 The short and succinct “looks great!” from the other side of the world, kept me fueled up.
Here’s Mr. Peter Criss a.k.a. the Catman. He was the drummer of the Rock band KISS. The caricature accompanies an article “Rock and Roll is (Mostly) Noise Pollution“.
The concept asked for Peter Criss (in his Catman costume) checking out the thesaurus, as the article is an interesting review of the mad-rush of rock-star autobiographies.
The text “Makeup? or… Breakup?” twists the title of his autobiography “Makeup to Breakup,” to build a connection with his checking out the thesaurus. I left the sticks on the ground – unattended…for now, because the autobiography takes up his attention.
What I loved painting the most?
That white face and those gloved hands…getting those highlights right was fun…and of course, it was a novel experience. You don’t paint a Catman every day.
The Color-scheme
You could look at it from a distance of 10 feet and figure out that the caricature plays out a complementary color-theme. I didn’t think about it then, but as you’ll see in the other caricatures too – they all turned out to follow the complementary color-theme. I guess it was an intuitive need to balance the colors.
Guess that’s all for now 🙂
(Note: I know that many of my visitors arrive here to read my verbal-caricatures. If I’ve disappointed you, I am sorry – but I’d recommend that you pick up a copy of The American Spectator and read “Rock and Roll is (Mostly) Noise Pollution.” I don’t have the nerve to write anything after reading that :))
I’d like to begin by apologizing for my long absence from blogging. While I could write unbelievable yet true stories about my being abducted to Atlantis or my journey into and out (no, not that way,) of a polar bear’s belly, but I have changed. I have transformed into a serious, good-for-nothing, dreamy-eyed artist, and so I must tell you the truth. I was busy, and I still am, but I was so ashamed of my tardiness that I decided it was time that I made this post about Just-in Bee-burr!
If you are below 18, you may try to scratch my eyes out for caricaturing your heart throb, the oh-so-cute Bee-burr, but the adults of this world, the ones who really count (in my opinion,) will appreciate my ability to recognize, and then remember this young boy with diamond earrings and…well, a thatch of golden hair that keeps changing its direction. You see, at my age, all kids begin to look-alike.
Here’s his caricature with his golden hackles up!
Don’t get me wrong. I love the boy. He’s neat and clean, and cute, and he’s even finished High School in order to please his mom (who’s quite young herself.) I’d say that his achievement of becoming a multi-millionaire at this tender age is dwarfed by these other important achievements. I mean, kids his age try their best to look as shabby as a porcupine that’s been out all night, and they compete to find the most effective method to make their parents unhappy. But Bee-burr isn’t like all other kids and moms would be mighty pleased to see their kids emulate him.
Just-in burst upon the American music scene when he was barely thirteen! Moms, tune in…this is how it happened. Justin’s mom made YouTube video of her son’s performance in a local singing competition. Now, there’s this particular African-American genre of music that originated in the 40s called Rhythm and Blues (lazily called R&B), and young Bieber sang in this genre. Now a gentleman called Mr. Scooter Braun discovered one of his videos and figured that the boy had talent, and so he found him out and then scooted him away to Atlanta. The rest is…as I’d say, recent history, and full of mind-boggling details too! So, if you’d like to boggle your mind, tap the mother lode of all information here.
Oh…I forgot to mention. He was born on March 01, 1994, in Canada, and his middle name is Drew.
Mozart, they say, was a musical prodigy. Even before he was five, he could play the keyboard and the violin, and he performed in front of the Royalty. Obviously such performances today will lead to protests by various organizations that safeguard the interest of children…so it was good that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in 1756 and not in 2006. With that little detail out of my way…
I present the caricature of the wigged musical genius, Mozart.
Mozart was born on a cold wintry morning in the January of 1756, in a place called Salzburg. Mozart was born with the musical gene riding his y chromosome, which he got from his dad. Incidentally his dad also had the right connections (he himself was in the court orchestra,) and a teacher of music. With the right genes, the right guidance, and the right push, it wasn’t long before Mozart and his sister made their first court appearance as child-prodigies.
It wasn’t that Mozart’s childhood was a bed of roses. I can imagine a three-year old being tutored by his dad, and a six-year-old being made to perform in front of the royalty – it sends a shiver down my spine! I am glad I wasn’t his sister, who went through a similar ordeal.
In 1773, when Mozart was 17, he got the job of the court musician at Salzburg. Unfortunately, job-satisfaction evaded him. He also thought that he wasn’t paid well. Obviously then, he did what anyone would do in his position, he floated his resume in the market. In 1777, Mozart had enough of Salzburg. He resigned and moved to Paris. Unfortunately, nothing worked out for him and he fell into debt. His dad however was one of the sweetest dads ever (quite like the Bollywood Star Amitabh Bachhan, who did everything to establish his son in Bollywood,) and he found a job for his son,…once again in Salzburg – the place Mozart didn’t want to come back to. But he did – and then gradually the wheel of fortune began to turn for him.
As it happens with most artists, Mozart too suffered a lot many ups and downs in his career.
If you are the musical kind, you may want to check out Mozart’s Music here 🙂
I see that the blog has been as active as ever and that the caricatures have been doing their bit to keep this place busy. Thank you my Dear Caricatures. My special thanks to:
This morning, I found myself bobbing up and down in the swimming pool of Hyatt Regency. I was semi-conscious and dressed in what can best be described an aquatic gear. But what the staff at the hotel truly found surprising was that I had sprouted fins and gills. I guess it comes from spending the last two weeks in the City of Atlantis. The fins and the gills are gradually reducing in size…even the webs that had grown between my fingers are shrinking! This means that I should be able to draw more caricatures soon!
More later…I am still not able to breathe properly in dry air, I need to dunk my head in a water jar to get my oxygen…
See you soon:)
A.S. Dileep Kumar who for some personal reasons changed his religion to Islam and his name to Allah Rakha Rahman is an Indian musician and music-composer, who won two Academy Awards for Slumdog Millionaire a movie directed by Danny Boyle.
Here’s my take on this legend.
The Halo of Music...or Controversies?
A.R. Rahman was born on January 6th 1966, in an affluent Hindu Tamil family. His father composed music for Malayalam films. He lost his father at a very young age and it was somewhere around that time when he and his entire family decided to change their religion and convert to Islam. According to this article here AR Rahman’s mother (Kareema) was a Muslim and after his Hindu father’s death, the family reconverted to Islam and acquired Muslim names. The reason why he changed his religion is still shrouded in mystery, however, it’s said that he did it to save his sister’s life.
Rahman is married to Saira Banu (not the emaciated yesteryear beauty though!)
An Interesting Bollywood Coincidence, which will make more sense to Indians:
Here it goes.
Saira Banu (of vintage Bollywood variety) married Dilip Kumar, who changed his name from Muhammad Yusuf Khan to Dilip Kumar – she did have to struggle with Yusuf Khan’s polygamous nature though. However Yusuf Khan took up the name Dileep Kumar only as a screen name with a wider appeal, and saw he was never on the wrong side of the law by having more than one wife.
Saira Banu (wife of AR Rahman) married AR Rahman, who changed his name from Dileep kumar (don’t worry about the spelling) to AR Rahman.
Coincidences happen in a chaotic world…right?
Rahman’s rise in Bollywood began with his meeting with Mani Ratnam in an advertising awards function, after which he gave music for Roja in 1992 (Note that Rahman was paid 25K INR (about USD 1000 in those days) to compose music for Roja, this is in stark contrast to around Rs. 5 Crores equivalent of USD 1 Million for composing the Commonwealth Games 2010 Anthem) After Roja, he created music for many Tamil films, until he got the opportunity to compose the songs for Rangeela. After the success of Rangeela’s songs, Rahman continued to work for the Mumbai Film Industry to compose many hit songs. Among his noteworthy films are: Rangeela, Dil Se, Taal, Rang De Basanti, Bombay!
His Album “Vande Mataram“, which he released on August 15, 1997 (the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence,) sold more than a Million copies in India.
Find an extremely detailed biography of Rehman here.
In 2009, Rahman wrote the score for “Jai Ho“, which helped him win the first two Oscars for India. He got the Oscars for Danny Boyle directed movie “Slumdog Millionnaire”. (Unfortunately, the only movie about India that became internationally famous is an extremely biased movie, which completely ignores the positives of India to accentuate and glorify its poverty.) The two Academy Awards that he won were for Best Original Music Score and Best Original Song.
Visit Rahman’s official website here.
The newest news on the international scene is that AR Rehman has bagged 2 Oscar nominations for Danny Boyle’s 127 hours. What’s noteworthy is the ease with which Rahman has been able to establish a long-term relationship with Danny Boyle – I’d have loved to see him work with other Hollywood Directors too…but Rahman is a steady goat, isn’t he? I hope he gets the Oscars this year, because after the CWG Anthem fiasco, which gave us a soggy song (read about it here) touted to be better than Shakira’s waka-waka, I’d love to get a confirmation that the awards were for the musical score and not for a fantastic rendering of India’s poverty. Go Rahman Go! Get those awards and win back my trust…if you’d care to.
I love some of his work – if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have drawn his caricature here:) But I saw him on the CWG stage – and I don’t think that if his…what was the CWG Anthem again?…well that anthem needed the crutches of Jai ho, especially when after the whole corruption scandal we were waiting for him to spin gold or silver at least…so – my current status is “NOT FAN!”
I believe there are things that are bigger than money, fame, and even Oscars. A sense of pride in being what you are and carrying it through with your head held high. I’d never work for a Slumdog Millionnaire nor would I ever charge Rs. 5 Crores for composing an anthem for my country. (Remember that it was the first time in its history that India was hosting a sports event at International scale!) But I guess I am being the milkmaid, if you know what I mean:)
I’d like to begin by thanking Ian for splashing his creativity on my blog and calling Leonardo Da Vinci, Leony Darling!
Thanks Ian. I am sure that if Da Vinci were born in our times, his mother and his numerous girlfriends and boyfriends would queue up behind me to thank you:)
So…
I dreamed of Leony Darling (looking young and dapper.) He was standing in Verrocchio’s workshop correcting the nose of the young angel in the painting that will later be called “Baptism of Christ.” When he heard me come in, he looked up and asked me to mix some paint for him, which I did only because I knew that he was going to be one of the Greats in future. He took the paint that I had mixed on a wooden palette, our fingers touched, and he froze; a glazed look came into his eyes and his voice changed. I understood that he was struck with a vision of the future. He said something to me in a rather quaint version of Italian, which Barb of Creative Barbwire translated for me.
He said, “I see you drawing the caricatures of this woman called Sarah Jessica Parker, who has a thin, emaciated, and elongated face and a man called A.R. Rahman, who is a short, rotund, and funny looking man. You would be publishing at least one of the two caricatures on your blog in the last week of January 2011!”
Believe it or not – half of the prophecy that Leony Darling made has already come true…and I am afraid that the other half shall come true too. I wish he had said something about whose caricature would be published first, but he didn’t. So it’s now up to you and me to decide. Who’d you like to see first?
Presenting…
Rihanna, the Barbadian Songwriter and Singer, who blends Rhythm and Blues, a genre of popular African American music that originated in 1940s, with Caribbean music!
Rihanna’s biography:
Rihanna, 22 now, was born in Barbados on February 20, 1988. An year before the release of her first album, she moved to the US. Rihanna began singing when she was barely 7. She had a troubled childhood because of her father’s drug addiction and later the divorce of her parents.
Rihanna formed a girl-band with two of her classmates, at the age of 15. It was around this time that she was discovered by Evan Rogers, the music producer. In about an year’s time Rihanna’s demo was ready and she had moved to the US with Rogers and his wife.
Her debut album Music of the Sun received mixed reviews – it was her second album “A Girl Like Me” which truly launched her in terms of numbers, yet even the second album didn’t please the critics. (What I often wonder is – why we’ve got the critics at all? I think that for an artist, writer, or performers – what matters is the verdict of people…Rihanna’s case proves my point.)
Rihanna however wasn’t in a mood to let the critiques stop her, and so with her third album she decided to change her image. (Image makeovers are extremely important – when things aren’t working out – shock people.) This was also the time when Rihanna dyed her hair black (from brown?) and changed her persona. This album had a song “Umbrella”, which became the worldwide No. 1 hit, and which also featured the American Rapper Jay-Z. Thus began Rihanna’s awards journey – and by 2008 Rihanna had become famous!
2009 wasn’t a good year for Rihanna as she made news as a battered woman who had been beaten up black and blue by her boyfriend Chris “Brown” (Christopher Maurice “Chris” Brown – who is a singer too)! (Chris says that he grew up in a family with domestic violence – but then that can be no excuse for beating anyone up, especially someone you say, you “love.”) She’s currently in a relationship with Matt Kemp.
(Recently, the image of Rihanna’s battered face has become the subject of a fresh Police Probe. )
Presenting John Lennon‘s Caricature!
I wonder why I wrote and sang “Imagine No Possessions”?
John Lennon was born on October 09, 1940, in Liverpool, UK. About 3 years after John was born, his father Alfred Lennon went away, only to return an year later when his wife would reject his offer to help the family financially. At the tender age of five, young John was forced to choose between his parents, and he chose to stay with his father, but unfortunately he couldn’t stay with him. Eventually he was brought up in a family that was made up of his four aunts and his mother. He was taken care of by his mother’s elder sister and her husband; and it was his uncle who brought him a mouth-organ when John was very young. His mom would play him Elvis Presley’s music and taught him to play the banjo.
John Lennon was never a model student, rather he was far from being one. He drew cartoons in class, mimicked his teachers, and was considered a bad influnce on other kids. When he was 17, his mom bought him his first guitar – some time soon after she gave John this wonderful gift, she died in a car-accident.
Lennon was one of the founding members of The Beatles. It was three months after he had started the Skiffle Group, that Paul McCartney joined the band. Lennon was always considered the leader of the band.
Of course a lot happened before Beatles became a rage in the mid-sixties. In the late sixties, The Beatles, specifically Mr. Lennon managed to hurt the religious sentiments of people, by commenting “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink…We’re more popular than Jesus now – I don’t know which will go first, rock and roll or Christianity.” I’d call it a harmless self-glorifying sort of comment, which should be forgotten and forgiven (something that I am sure, almost all religions preach), but people began burning the Beatle records and Lennon was threatened too! This probably led Lennon into depression, who discovered LSD and then Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and both helped him in his introspection.
One thing led to another (must’ve, I am sure) and in 1969 he left the Beatles, and developed some degree of disenchantment with and also some animosity towards Paul McCartney. For the next 10 years, Lennon went solo.
Read John Lennon’s detailed biography here.
Lennon met his future wife Cynthia when he was 17, and they married 5 years later. However their marriage fell apart soon after when Cynthia realized that Lennon was in a relationship with Yoko Ono, the artist. They got married in 1969. Upon Ono’s insistence, somewhere around this time, his PA May Pang developed a physical relationship with John Lennon. Nevertheless, Sean Lennon was born to Ono after which John Lennon transformed himself into a house-husband.
Other than singing, John Lennon was also a proficient writer and painter, and other than the guitar, he could also play drums and flute!
Sometime in the October of 1980, forty-year-old John Lennon was shot dead by a psychopath (who refused to accept that he were one) called Mark David Chapman. Chapman claimed that he killed Lennon for his irreverence and also because of his double standards. According to Chapman, he was motivated by the book “The Catcher in the Rye” a novel by J. D. Salinger, and that he was sickened by Lennon’s song “Imagine no Possessions“.
Chapman said, “He told us to imagine no possessions, and there he was, with millions of dollars and yachts and farms and country estates, laughing at people like me who had believed the lies and bought the records and built a big part of their lives around his music.”
Chapman has still not been granted parole.
Find a list of his popular songs here
As always, thanks to the one and only Wikipedia!
Artists are the often-lost-(and-seldom-found) people in this universe. We’d beat the scientists and the professors at any absent-mindedness contest with no preparation at all! Here’s what happened.
I was all bleary-eyed, puffy-faced, and red-nosed with all that weeping, crying, and throwing tantrums for anyone around to pick one or two, when in my mailbox, among those clones of freebooter emails, I saw a contest announcement email for John Lennon‘s caricature. Now I don’t have that knack for entering art contests – not because I can’t draw, but because I can’t read the rules…and in my completely distraught state, which I just described to you, I couldn’t even read the name of the FaceBook group that had announced the contest!
So after I had painstakingly created the caricature, I posted it to the wrong group! (I rather liked this “wrong” group…it’s for ancient and almost extinct, non-digital artists, such as yours truly, so a shrink would possibly ascribe my error to some silly psychological principle of my seeing what I wanted to see…or something like that.)
The point is – now I am not motivated to find the right group anymore – and so I’ll bring that caricature to this blog, sometime today:)
Friends, this is one of my favorite caricature. It depicts Lennon in heaven, wondering why did he ever think of writing “Imagine No Possessions“!
Until then, then!
DRAW to SMILE!
PS: A Facebook friend just told me how I could enter it into the contest correctly – so I’ve done it…and as this group doesn’t mind my posting the caricature to my blog, I’d be adding it here as well…Yay!
Lady Gaga (yes the very same lady who’s entangled in a Bad Romance) is an extremely interesting and an unbelievably creative person.
She is a magician, a dress designer, a hairdresser, a lyricist…and of course, she is a woman trying hard to prove that she’s indeed one. If you ask me, she is one of those amazingly talented control-freaks who don’t even want to leave their caricatures to chance – they want to do them themselves! (Remember Ozzy Osbourne?)
Anyone who’s ever looked at Lady Gaga would know that there’s no caricaturist in the world who could do a better job of caricaturing her, than the lady herself. However, I made the attempt, and now I am here to discuss how you too can draw Lady Gaga’s caricature. (And no – you don’t stop at making her portrait!)
Here’s the caricature under discussion.
Lady Gaga and the Spider Colony!
Lady Gaga’s eyes are characterized by the kohl she puts around them! You’ve got to load her eyelids and eyelashes with black paint to get the look right. Also stretch those eyelashes to exaggerate them. Don’t change the basic almond shape of her eyes.
Read about “Caricaturing the Eyes” here.
Lady Gaga has thicker than usual lips (which go well with her slightly heavy yet chubby face.) Note that I’ve drawn her with an open mouth, which helps you see her teeth. Her teeth are slightly crooked and I’ve maintained that lack of symmetry in the drawing.
Read about “Caricaturing the Lips and the Mouth” here.
(If I were drawing the caricature of a man, I’d treat the teeth differently (they’d be exaggerated to add more humor to the treatment.) However, while drawing the caricatures of women – ensure that their caricatures continue to look pretty:-))
Ah! This is where I had to compete with Ms. Gaga herself. I selected what I call her “Candy Floss with Noodles” hairstyle. The size of her coiffure was big enough but I did exaggerate it a bit. The cobwebs were added for the storyline.
(Read about “Caricaturing the Forehead, the Hairline, and the Hair” here.)
Storyline?
Well. Since Ms. Gaga had done a great job of caricaturing herself, I had to go do something extra to exaggerate her hairstyle, and so I thought of the spiders and the cobwebs. Whenever Lady Gaga discards a wig, the space on the wig is auctioned away to the spiders that want to move in to this “premium” location!
Well…
So in came the spiders and their webs, and of course the decorations added by the property dealers along with the prize car!
And Ms. Gaga was decked up and ready to give the other singers a run for their money!
And yes, if you want to learn how to draw caricatures, you should check out “How to Draw Caricatures – And Evolution of a Caricaturist.”
Before I wave goodbye, here’s an interesting bit about her current hit “Bad Romance”.
Bad Romance is a bad-bad song that begins with the abduction of Lady Gaga by some super-models. These super-models, who probably are about to slide into middle age and hence into oblivion, dream up a new way to make money. They kidnap Lady Gaga, bathe her in a white bathtub, and then in her inebriated condition attempt to auction her off to the Russian Mafia. (Note the Russian connection in all such deals, and also note the marked absence of the Italian Mafia from this whole show.)
While the Russian men sit around with their electronic bidding machines, Lady Gaga seductively walks towards them and then selects the one with a golden chin guard (guess he wore it because he expected Lady Gaga to slap him) to do a provocative lap-dance for him. Now this all is hogwash, because after he becomes the highest bidder, she roasts him alive by activating her pyrotechnic bra. The point to be noted here is the Lady Gaga remains unscathed…and probably vanishes with the auction money, and shares the booty with the models who had kidnapped her…because it was all staged!
But that part wasn’t there in the video that I watched, and so I believe that the video was edited! If anyone has access to the unedited video of the song Bad Romance , please let me know, because I am dying to hear the end of the story.
BTW, I wonder if the Russian Men would have bid at all if she had worn her meat dress to the auction?
(Lady Gaga’s Meat Dress.)
I can’t stop myself from writing this post…so I’d begin by apologizing to my serious visitors – I am sorry! This isn’t a deliberate, thoughtful post – it’s what the netizens would call an impulse post.
You see I came upon the search string, “How to Draw Ozzy Osbourne” in my blog’s data. Isn’t that the joke of the day?! Do you really need to figure it out? Really?!
You see…you don’t make Ozzy’s caricature – he’s already done the job for you. Instead, you make his portrait! So if you can draw, you can draw his caricature!
Here are some other “How to Draw the Caricature of…”! Smile Away:-)
Draw the nose, the ears, and the spectacles – the viewers will fill in the rest.
Read the Post on the Caricature of Mahatma Gandhi
Forget it. I’ve tried but I believe that no caricaturist can beat Ozzy himself, when it comes to drawing his caricature.
Read the Post on the Caricature of Ozzy Osbourne
Draw Gandhi’s caricature, add hair, and remove the spectacles.
Read the Post on the Caricature of Abraham Lincoln
Draw the fishbowls. Period.
Read the Post on the Caricature of Pamela Anderson
Draw a nest, or a Computer, or a Robot, or a Christmas Tree; and label it “Lady Gaga”
Read the Post on the Caricature of Lady Gaga
Draw the crown. Period.
Read the Post on the Caricature of Queen Elizabeth II
Draw the cap, the women, the Nike symbol…or…to draw a more modern Tiger Woods, draw a Tiger lost in the Woods with beautiful tigresses to give him company!
Read the Post on the Caricature of Tiger Woods, his Women, and the Devil.
I could go on and on, and never stop…but I’ve got to go! Have fun, enjoy, and Draw Ozzy Osbourne’s Caricature – and see if you can do a better job than he did.
And…
if you are serious about doing caricatures, you must check out my FREE Online Book “How to Draw Caricatures – Evolution of a Caricaturist“!
The Rodent Warrior Fights Back!
On December 3rd, 1948; a baby was born who’d father Heavy Metal, and whose music would be “intentionally” dark!
This sweet little baby grew up with dyslexia, a learning disability that has plagued many famous personalities. Obviously his teachers thought nothing of him because teachers prefer average performers, and so he was drawn towards more interesting matters such as stage performances.
Before Ozzy Osbourne began his “black” career, he worked as a laborer, plumber, tool-maker and even a sort of butcher. It’s easy to see how all this work-experience may have been instrumental in the making of the “black” sabbath, and the “heavy metal.” Black Sabbath was born in 1969, and as anything black is usually high in demand and short in supply, it met with a phenomenal success. For obvious reasons, the band was more popular among men.
Moving from gray to dark gray to black to ebony…
And then Ozzy oozed off the Black Sabbath for a solo project he called Blizzard of Ozz (How creative!) Things didn’t work out until 1980, when Ozzy’s wife (ahem! Well yes. Brand new grapevine starting here has it that whenever a woman spent a night with Ozzy in the morning she’d leave looking like Ozzy’s double. Looking at Ozzy’s face in the darkness of the night had that effect on them. (see picture above) – but Sharon survived it all. The next morning she was as pretty as she was the night before – and so Ozzy slipped one of his many rings on her ring finger and they became an item (read: got married.) BTW, Another survivor was his first wife Thelma Rieley. Amazing women – both!
To make a long story short – Ozzy went on singing… there were many other albums…here’s a list (as always thanks to Wikipedia.)
And yes…
those who are interested in Ozzy’s tattoos, should click here.
Finally, in defence of Ozzy Osborne and his brave wife Sharon Osborne, they are one of the richest couples in UK. Doesn’t matter if Ozzy looks a little mad. I mean – all the rich of the world are a little mad…he just doesn’t hide his madness…he lets it Ooze out of him ozzily!
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