Blast from the Past: The Caricaturist Travels through Time and returns with the Funny Man!

Meet the Funny Man. I did this caricature last year, and if the date on the page of my 2013 diary can be relied on – it was done on April 15th – more than a year ago.

This drawing was done with Staedler’s Luna Pencils – the only color pencils that I had until I discovered Derwent. I had bought that set of pencils way back in 2001 or 2002, when a dear friend of mine and an exceptionally good artist told me that even grownups use color pencils. He had accompanied me to an art-supplies store (there weren’t many good ones in the city back then) and we had a bought a set for me, which unlike his set, didn’t come in a tin box (I still remember the slight twinge of disappointment that I had experienced then – so it must’ve been important for me back then. Today it won’t matter.)

Anyway, the point is, I drew this Funny Man with those pencils.

An Awesome nose on an awesome face…la…la…la

Then we started working on Toonsie Roll – a Caricature maker App that harnesses your intuition and your power of observation to help you tap out cute and cool-looking caricatures. Now everyone who’s got a smartphone knows that apps have icons…and I really wanted this app icon to cute, funny, and cool…and if possible, I wanted it to be intuitive too. So I sketched stuff out and we evaluated the sketches. We did everything that all the great artists do. We squinted, we walked backward to stand at a distance and look at the sketches, then we scanned them and zoomed them out to see if they were too cluttered. They passed the tests but they could make our hearts beat faster, because they all lacked the spontaneity that we were looking for.

Then we heard from some people who wanted me to create a few drawings for them…in the funny man style. So I went back to the post and checked it out – and when I looked at it, I knew that this guy could represent the spirit of Toonsie Roll. If it was a drawing app, we’d probably have gone ahead with the color-pencil drawing, but Toonsie Roll stays with the realistic photo-feel, so I painted the guy. Now he appears on the icon and also on the Splash Screen (I’ll share it with you soon.)

So this is how the Funny Guy got selected, got painted, and got framed! Toonsie Roll will soon be on the App Store for everyone who wants to create cute and funny caricatures (of friends, foes, or yourself – for a caricature avatar perhaps,) using a stylish app on their iPhones or iPads 🙂 I’ll keep you posted on this – so if you want to know when you can grab a copy of the app, just leave me a note using this contact form here.

Click to Read about Toonsie Roll.

This week I need to sketch a cute ex-President of the United States. I am looking forward to it…but today I was totally booked for Toonsie Roll!

You keep smiling while I rock and roll with Toonsie Roll 🙂

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A Toonsie Roll Caricature of Hrithik Roshan…

…Who Goes Bang Bang this Thursday, Despite his Health Problems!

This post is the result of Hrithik’s interview that was published in today’s TOI. At the onset, I must tell you that I am not a fan of Hrithik the Bollywood Actor. In fact, I’ve seen just one movie of his (one of the Krishh’s, and I’ve forgotten which one.) And yet, now I have become one of the biggest fans of Hrithik the person behind the actor. I like brave people, and I think that bravery is an attribute of the human mind. It doesn’t depend upon anything external to a person – neither their station in life, nor their physical strength. Some people are brave, others just aren’t; they whine and cry and want the whole world to understand their problems, without ever taking the first important step, which is realizing that they are the only ones who can solve their problems and all that whining actually drives the right kind people away from them.

( Note: The above caricature was done using Toonsie Roll – A Caricaturing/Caricature-making iPhone/iPad app.)

In my estimate, Hrithik Roshan is one of the bravest celebs that clutter our waking moments. He is someone who is an inspiration to many who battle chronic illnesses and debilitating pain. Almost all his life, he has lived with excruciating pain and with bones that broke on the slightest pretext. He has been suffering from arthritis from a very young age, and when he was a teenager, his doctors had told him that he had the skeleton of an old man. He was advised against becoming an actor. In Bollywood, you can’t be a star if you don’t dance (yes, pelting your pelvis as far as you can in all directions and gyrating on the beats of a raunchy number – stuff that is really really bad for your back); or  if you don’t do stunts (toss yourself up in the air with your limbs flailing and hitting ten goons at once)! So Hrithik, the boy with a spine that was proclaimed geriatric by the medicos shouldn’t have done any of what he did. Instead, he should’ve stayed home, watched dvds, ate potato-chips, grown corpulent, started a blog, and talked about how unfair life was.

But Hrithik did something different. He looked at the hand of cards that fate had dealt to him, figured out a strategy to beat the odds, and stayed in the game. Yes, he came from a fairly affluent family. Yes, he could get a doctor’s attention whenever he needed it. But nothing could’ve made him the star that he is today – nothing except his own determination to beat the odds.

So far, this year has been terrible for Hrithik. When he was shooting for Bang Bang, he got ill because there were blood-clots in his brain and he had to undergo a brain-surgery. His backache, his companion of 27 years, has been troubling him so much that he travels in a convoy of three cars, because he can’t sit in one position for more than 30 minutes. On the personal front, he has filed for a divorce from his wife, who he confirms, has not asked for an alimony of 400 Crs. (The amount sounded ridiculous any way,) and when the divorce is through he may lose the custody of his two sons to his wife. That’s a lot for anyone to handle – and yet he handles it all so well. The boy whose was advised not to be an actor, is the one who has made Roshans a recognized name in the Indian Film Industry.  He’s an excellent dancer, he looks muscular in his movies, he does all those stunts that movies require him to do – and I think he is able to do it because he has a beautiful mind.

He says that he always tried being a nice person, but it didn’t work, because when you try to be nice to everyone and not hurt anyone, you try to achieve the impossible and end up hurting yourself; so you must try to be a good person instead. A good person does good whenever he or she can, but doesn’t try to please everyone. I agree – totally.

So that’s that about Hrithik. I wish him the best and I hope that he continues to win the battle that he is fighting with his illnesses. Another braveheart that I want to mention here is Shubhpreet Kaur Ghumman. This post isn’t about this one-legged brave beauty, but here’s the link to her Facebook page.

I’ll be writing a set of tutorials on How to Create Caricatures with Toonsie Roll, so do return.