Like last year, I took part in the worldwide event Inktober 2017. This was started by Jake Parker and you can read about it here.
I chose to post my works on Instagram and a private group on Facebook, dedicated to drawing every day.
Last year, I drew whatever caught my fancy and ignored Inktober's official prompt list as I thought that it was too restrictive. This year, however, I decided to stick to the prompt list as a challenge. It turned out to be an exercise in lateral thinking and I surprised myself and thoroughly enjoyed the process of first interpreting the word and then creating a visual to represent it. I often rejected the first word associations and dug deep into my memories and, dare I say, imagination to decide what to draw.
The tools I used were fountain pens, brushes, ink - diluted or otherwise, pigment markers for creating different effects. I used Camlin and Parker inks as they exhibit different colours when diluted - revealing how their blacks were composed.
I have posted here all the pictures I drew and some notes about them - almost as a diary.
Since these pictures were meant to be viewed on a mobile phone, essentially, I have restricted their size here too. It also helps reduce some blemishes in drawing and finishing - which I left in the pictures, knowingly.
I do hope you enjoy them. The word with which the notes start is the prompt word for the day.
1 Swift: Jonathan Swift - the author of Gulliver's Travels. I did not want to draw the immediate word associations such as the car of that name, the bird, anything moving swiftly. After a lot of thought, off and on, over the day, Swift popped up and here he is!
2. Divided: A little girl whose hair is divided into two ponytails.
3. Poison: I drew Socrates receiving the cup containing the poison - Hemlock. I drew it with the painting by David - a painting I love - as reference.
4. Underwater: I have a strange aversion to underwater creatures! I do eat fish though. I decided to play with the word and made it under water. I drew the word Inktober seen under a drop of water. And played visually with the word Inktober under the word water.
5. Long: I was stuck with the meaning of long in a three dimensional world. A friend brought in the fourth temporal dimension. So the legend on the picture reads "A watched kettle never boils. Never is a long time indeed".
6. Sword: The most direct visualisation. The sword of Tipu Sultan.
7. Shy: During my active bird watching days. I was always amused by writers referring to some birds as shy. The Indian Koel is one of them. The Koel female, which looks so different from the male which looks like an elongated crow is hardly ever seen in the open. Flying, not too elegantly, from tree to tree without coming into the open.
8: Crooked I tried to paint the image in my mind from the days of reading "Chandamama" - full of delightful cock and bull stories. Many stories had a crooked and scary tamarind tree - the dwellings of ghosts, banshees and white clad Mohinis.
9: Screech: A speeding snail comes to a screeching halt as its path is crossed by a speeding centipede and exclaims haughtily, with dismay, "What is the big hurry, huh!?"
10 Gigantic: The Word giant is derived from Latin word gigas. In German a giant is still a Gigant. So, I drew Mahishasura, after whom Mysore is named. But who am I to say who it is in the picture! So, if you have a favourite giant, it is he.
11. Run: The very idea of running brings up the names of the gods of middle and long distance running to my mind. Abebe Bikila, Emil Zatopek, Lasse Viren, Pavo Nurmi . . . Zatopek - "the flying Czech", "the Grimacing Czech", "the human locomotive", who ran a marathon for the very first time of his life in an Olympics and, hold your breath - won it, has always been my favourite.
"
12. Shattered: Busy with work, late in the evening, I had no idea what to draw. The shattered thigh of duryodhanana oorubhanga by Bhaasa? glass shattered? shattering news? Shattered mind? No time, no energy, no ideas. I was shattered. A quick selfie and here it is.
13.Teeming: Head teeming with ideas but the other conditions, the same as yesterday. A mirror comes in handy. I drew the laterally inverted image of myself.
14. Fierce: The fierce focus of a fiercely loyal guard of an imaginary master in an imaginary play
15. Mysterious:
16. Fat: Science meets art. Fat is fact. The humps of a camel is widely believed to store water. Neither that theory nor the humps hold water. The humps hold fat. A Bactrian camel.
17. Graceful: Anna Pavlova as the dying swan. If this picture represents the ethereal grace even a little, I am satisfied.
18. Filthy: What can be filthier than violence and the instruments of violence! A poster with a quote from "The answer my friend . . . " by Bob Dylan and a drop of red ink.
19. Cloud: I love clouds - to photograph, paint, observe, interpret both visually and as an indicator of weather to come. This is a world where the cloud is ubiquitous. I only wonder if the "we-knew-it-all-the-while" crowd will one day claim that the cloud technology existed at the time of Kalidasa.
20: Deep. He looked so deep into the past, scientifically, that he came up with the theory of the big bang. A catholic priest from the catholic university of Leuven coming up with this theory is very interesting.
21. Furious: I imagined a hungry tiger disturbed at its kill after an exhausting hunt.
22. Trail. The faintly visible trail of a black swan, in the moonlight. Drawn in pen and brush and CTRL + Alt + I on Microsoft Paint.
23. Blind.
Q> Why does a skull look so happy?
A> Because, ignorance is bliss.
Correct
No eyes, no ears, no skin, no tongue, no nose. Ignorance!
24. Ship: Ship of the desert - the Dromedary camel.
The Arabs value this ugly supercilious looking animal which always seems to look down upon you so much that they have a story as to why it looks down upon man.
Allah has a thousand names. 999 of which are known to man. Only the camel knows the thousandth one. Hence the contempt.
25. Squeak: A young girl delighted with her new squeaky shoes.
26. Climb: A creeper climbs. Money plant over a bamboo support. In this painting the ink produced some unusual hues. Loved the lucky accident.
28. Fall: For me, the best piece of my Inktober works. This idea was suggested by a friend for last year's Inktober. Lack of time and either the lack of skills needed or the lack of confidence in my skills made me shelve it then. The moment I saw 'fall' in the list of prompts, I knew what I wanted to draw. Having grown up in a book filled house, being a notorious book worm then (None of them text books) I drew an imaginary 'cartoony' portrait of myself from my college days. Imagine that one of the books falling is "The rise and fall of the Third Reich" by William Shirer.
29. United: Opportunity for word play.
30. Found. Stanley finds the long lost Dr. Livingstone after a long search and is said to have greeted him, they were formal days, with, "Dr Livingstone, I presume". Sounds hilarious to me.
31. Mask. A mask for the wall. Avalokiteswara, a name the sound of which I love. And the concept of this Bodhisatva - he has the compassion of all the Buddhas in him.
