Nov 5 2017

Discovering the Artist within me (Part IV) – I am what I think.

I am what I think, and because art is an artist’s expression, my art too would have a bit of me in it. If it has then by logical extension, my art is my thoughts. When my thoughts stretch beyond the realm of cognitive thinking and spill over its boundaries, they become my feelings and emotions, so my art should also be my feelings and emotions. This is why my art would be the outcome of my past interactions with the world, for they shaped my thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Some of these are buried in my subconscious, but most live in a twilight zone that exists between my conscious clarity and my sub-conscious nebulosity.

In my paintings, I sometimes return to caricatures. Mostly because the watered down version of reality that we often deal with in our lives, doesn’t let us experience life completely. Evil exists, and often its darker than black. Goodness too exists and sometimes it brighter than white. We usually choose to experience life in moderate shades of gray.

The Darkest Grays and the Deepest Blacks

A boy we’ve known from childhood can be a little wayward, but he cannot be the rapist who pulled out the entrails of a girl he violated. A bow-legged nephew who is always so charming in his manners, cannot be a pedophile who molests a woman’s daughter. An eighty year old frail woman couldn’t have gotten her sons beaten black and blue by her husband because she liked seeing her husband beat his sons whom she had hated bearing.

We choose not the believe the darkest grays and the deepest blacks, because believing would lead us to question everything around us, and our virtual safety bubble that allows us to sleep peacefully at nights, would vanish.

The Lightest Grays and the Brightest Whites

We also raise eyebrows when a billionaire decides to spend his billions in research and development that doesn’t turn his billions into trillions but helps the masses that hang from the cliff of their existence by their fingernails. We don’t trust his good intentions. We find ourselves at a loss of words when a client doesn’t try to bargain our skin off our backs.

We see the hand of God at work when anyone goes out of his or her way to help, because such bright and light grays and such brilliant whites appear impossible in our imperfect human world.

I think that as an artist I attempt to capture these two ends of the human spectrum, for what lies in the middle is a diluted version of life. I believe artists must think and feel, and then reach out to pull the two ends into their work.

Apr 2 2013

Freud’s Cartoon Analyzes Sherlock Holmes’ Psychology while Vladimort, Salman Khan, and the Psycho-Lady Rock and Roll in the Antechamber!

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….

1. types of artists

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.

2. sherlock holmes psychological analysis

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….

3. vladimort cartoon

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 🙂

4. caricature of salman khan

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.

5. caricature adam et satan

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!

6. sigmund freud cartoon dreams

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.

Cartoon, Caricature, Drawing, Portrait, Sketch of Sigmund Freud the man who gave us the Oedipus complex and the freudian slip.

I know what you are thinking.

7. rock and roll cartoons

I love these, and thank you for searching 🙂

8. viking caricatures

Thanks for the idea. I’ll make one 🙂

9. learn to caricature like Mario Miranda

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.

10. psycho lady cartoon

Check out my avatar 🙂

11. cute husband with nagging wife

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!

12. titanic merkel

She is indeed the Titanic Merkel, isn’t she?

She’s also Merkel the Dragon-slayer!

13. one direction caricature

???
I am sure this has a deep meaning. I just don’t know what. Let me try.

It could a coded love-message sent to me by my long-lost college sweetheart.

No?!

It could be a caricature of a person looking for directions.

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.

14. shafali.wordpress.com/shafali’s caricatures/evolution of a caricaturist!

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 🙂

Nov 24 2010

Cartoon/caricature Sculpture in Polymer Clay– The Devil – Satire/Story – The Devil Wants Out!

Well…here’s my Clay Caricature Number 3 – The Devil (or the Devil’s son – if you go by the story that follows the picture.) You are welcome to view my previous sculpting efforts the Harlot here and the Bald Man here.

A Caricature, Cartoon Sculpture of the horned Devil in Polymer Clay.

Caricature/Cartoon in Polymer Clay. Title: "The Horned Devil" Size: 2.25" tall x 1.5" wide x 1.5" deep.

The Devil Wants Out!

(A Tiny Story/Satire – by The Caricaturist)

He sat in his room watching Bedazzled – a Devil Movie from his Hollywood collection. His father, the Devil, disapproved of all but the Devil movies – so though he disliked them he didn’t have a lot of other options. Thankfully, he rather liked this particular movie – Watching Liz Hurley play the Devil was like seeing his dad in a gown…and he found it hilarious – the buttered Popcorn, the sexy Devil and the star-struck Fraser – all made his life seem a little worthwhile, but he knew that this feeling of wholesomeness would disappear the moment the movie ended – the movie just helped him escape his reality.

His reality was Hell. He was expected to take over as the CEO of Hell when his dad retired at the end of the century – and he really didn’t want to. He didn’t like his Job Description at all. Collecting souls, sorting them, meting out the right punishment in the right measure – all this was just one part of it… the glamorous part! The other part was recruiting help, managing them, overseeing them, auditing the processes…why, just the other day he had caught a minion accepting bribe for moving a promiscuous lawyer’s spiky bed near a harlot’s fire!

He’d swap his life with anyone’s… Liz Hurley’s, Brendan Fraser’s, even Jim Carrey’s – of course he’d love to be Paris Hilton and send her here in his place, but his puritan dad would kill him if it was discovered that he traded places with a woman – and then there was the obvious bottleneck – what did Paris know of sins, and sinners, and hell? Lady Gaga was another interesting possibility what with her meat dress and her devilish attitude – but then despite the controversy there was a good chance that she too was a woman – and he didn’t want to risk making his father go berserk.

Two years ago, he would’ve happily swapped with Barack Obama, but then being a brand new politician he was a novice in the matters of hell…and today, Obama were probably stuck worse than him! That won’t work. He wanted to swap with someone who had inherited a lot of wealth because inherited wealth would help him sin and sinning would make sure that he returned to hell instead of going to heaven, which of course was out of question! He was also open to reviewing potential swaps with people in power because power too made people sin.

So he thought and he thought, until the movie ended – but he reached no conclusion. He wanted to do something else…he didn’t want to do what the eldest son always did – run Hell efficiently…

There had to be a way out – somewhere, if not in the present, in the past – there would be someone who had it in him – who he could swap places with! As he browsed through the recorded programs on the History Channel, he found his answer.

A Caricature of Adolf Hitler, Nazi Dictator with Horns!

He was going to swap with Adolf Hitler!

——–(ooo)——–

Mar 5 2010

The List of Celebrities whose Caricatures Grace this Blog…so far:-)

As many of my visitors would know, I started this blog sometime in the middle of December 2010. Since then, I’ve added quite a few Celebrity Caricatures to it. The regular visitors have probably seen them all, but I wouldn’t want my new visitors to miss out on the treats:) So here’s a consolidated list for your viewing delight.

Another Caricature of a Forever Celebrity graced this blog recently (The Pierced, Tattooed, Dermal-Implanted, and Otherwise Modified Human’s Unique Selling Proposition!)

If you liked my caricatures and if you’d like to make caricatures too…my Book – “How to Draw Caricatures – Evolution of a Caricaturist” , which I am publishing as a collection of knols, should interest you. If you are interested…do visit. You can also read more about this book in “The Book” section of this blog. Your comments shall be appreciated.

Dec 19 2009

Caricature – Tiger Woods, Women, Nike, and Satan!

Golf brought to Tiger – fame, money, and women…along with Nike…and then Satan followed him around!

Caricature of Tiger Woods - with women, Nike, and Satan.

Who wouldn’t?

Which man could resist such temptation while chanting the brand mantra, “Just Do It”? Think about it!

News Flash – Calendars are Up!
Download Tiger Wood’s Printable Calendar pdf here.
(Opens in New Window and includes a crisp print-quality image of this caricature.)