The Caricaturist’s New Year Resolutions for 2021 – and the sharing caring mouse.

… to keep or not to keep them is the Question!

But hey, I read somewhere that only about 8% of those who make New Year Resolutions keep them, while almost 50% of world makes them.

So… to flow with the current, to be fashionable, to go along, to be a spoke in the wheel, and to blend in, I can belong to either camp, but then if I did end up keeping them, I’d be a black sheep, an oddball, a misfit, a crackpot!

So, I’ve decided to do it 50-50…because I really want to fit in. I’ve been a shoe that doesn’t fit, a quirky fun-poking trouble-making caricaturist for what…around 12 years now? Now I want to become the snug and comfy grandma’s slippers.

I seriously want to go for a makeover – like some girls I know would, when they get married. The infinite string of boyfriends, the home-breaker routines they pulled on other women, the marijuana puffs, the cigarette-butts, will all be dumped in a memory-closet, as each morning they would cover their heads and touch the feet of their elders to seek their blessings.

Oh wow!

An entirely new life…is what I’ll be looking at with my new year resolutions!

So, here’s your crazy caricaturist going for her crazy makeover.

In the year 2021,

1. I’ll stop doing caricatures instead I’ll paint sad-looking, pining-for-their-partner women, sitting under a dusty, orphan little shrub growing on the side of our city roads.
2. I’ll always have a sweet but sad smile pasted on my face; I’ll stop looking people in the eye, and play with my hair while talking to men – so that I appear mysterious and confuse the hell out of them.
3. I’ll talk with an affected lilt and I’ll twirl and swirl (which I obvious can’t do in a pair of jeans – so I’ll find a broomstick skirt with sufficient flare to twirl.)
4. …

You don’t like it, do you?

But hey, I was only making resolutions. Remember, to disappear in the crowd, I must not keep them!

Ouch!

Here’s your caricaturist, doing the right thing. Making caricatures and cartoons – and professing that sharing is caring.

If you have a mouse in your house, dear reader, it is your responsibility to provide the little mite free boarding and lodging…preferably someone on your person. Be as Ron Weasley is to Scabbers. (This, however, isn’t Ron Weasley.)

Happy New Year – 2021 – Card by Shafali – Sharing is Caring

 

Have a Beautiful and Safe New Year!

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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 🙂

Another Tryst with Color Pencils – A Beautiful Witch with Hypnotic Eyes Emerges.

Those pencils had been languishing in my desk drawers for a whole year. I wouldn’t have bothered with them, had I not gone to the stationery shop to buy pens for my pen & ink drawings. I had ordered some pens, and the shop-owner had called up to tell me that they had arrived. So yesterday, I went to the shop to pick them up.

Every artist knows how addicting these shops can be. Sketchbooks, notebooks, canvas-pads, diaries, drawing-boards, pencils, pens, brushes, colors, paints…I could go on and on…and still not finish the list. The point is that the way the stereotypical woman is addicted to showrooms that are stocked with clothes, shoes, and makeup material; the stereotypical artist is addicted to a stationery shop.

Let me cut a long yarn short and tell you that the pens that I had ordered were ready, and I should have just paid for them, taken them, and left. Instead, I got hooked. I checked out their paper inventory, their notebooks/sketchbooks inventory, and then I came to a stop right in front of the shelves that held the color pencils!

Color Pencils! I had bought a stash last year!

The rest, honestly, is a blur.

All I wanted to do was reach home and get those pencils out and start drawing.

This is what I drew.

The Beautiful Witch – 12″ x 16″ Cartridge Sheet – Done with Derwent Watercolor pencils (without water)

 

The head-dress, I admit, is a little odd…a feather, a lace-edged fan sort of thing (a collar from an old ragged dress worn as a head-ornament), a feather, a colorful rag around her head. Why would a beautiful woman choose to wear something as unfashionable as that? Before you admonish me for the strange headdress, allow me to defend myself.

The headdress is odd, because I wasn’t really thinking. I just wanted to try out the pencils and see how I could blend the colors. I learned that the blending was terrible and that I might have to check out the Pastels when I went to the stationery store the next time.

I do like the eyes. They rivet you. I like the underbite too. It makes her look witch-like in a subtle but intelligent way. It amuses me to think how even the slightest of underbite can change the whole expression – how it can turn a smile into a smirk.

I’m not satisfied with the look, the texture, and the brightness of the colors; but I post this to record my experiments with color-pencils. Note that though I used Derwent Watercolor pencils to draw with, I didn’t use water on the image. The application of water could brighten it up by heightening the contrast, but I just wanted the dry pencil look.

More on this later…when I suffer the next bout of color-pencil inspiration.

Meanwhile, if you want to meet someone who simply loves color pencils, meet Creative Barbwire 🙂

Color-Pencil Portrait Drawing – Bipasha Basu magically appears on a page of my diary!

Read the story of Bipasha Basu’s Diary Portrait here.

And here’s the portrait in question.

Read about Bipasha Basu here.

She’s known for her bold roles, her item numbers, and her relationship with John Abraham (until about a year ago, they were together.) The caricaturist thinks that she’s one of the most beautiful women actors in Bollywood.

Warning – The following three paragraphs are only for the loony artists! (Please note that if reasonable people read it, fall asleep, hit their heads on their keyboards accidentally sending the email meant for their sweethearts to their bosses – I’ll not be held responsible for the fireworks that follow.)

If you don’t believe the Tom Riddle story, here’s another one.

Last year I was at a stationery store buying a clutch-pencil (which by the way, is my favorite drawing instrument.) I don’t know how and why, the salesman thought that I’d be interested in some terribly expensive drawing pencils. I looked at this set of twelve pencils, checked the price, did a quick calculation, and decided that I wasn’t going to be fooled into buying pencils that would cost me a dollar fifty per piece. Ten minutes later, I left the store with 12 Derwent Water Color Pencils. The pencils came home and went straight into my drawing materials cupboard that is accessed about once a year. I remained loyal to my clutch-pencil. One of these days when I am feeling less possessive about it, I’ll shoot a picture and show you this beautiful Rotring pencil that’s been my constant companion for the last five years.

To make a long story short, those pencils stayed in the cupboard, until about a week ago, when I needed some yellow stickies and for some reason I thought that if I dived in deep enough into that treasure chest of a cupboard, I’d find them. So I dived in, and came up with the stickies and…that box of Derwent Pencils.

The newspaper that lay on the table had Bipasha’s picture in an ad, and my diary lay next to the newspaper. This is how everything came together, and I ended up drawing Bipasha’s portrait in my diary.