Cut Paper – Work In Progress

Some new work in progress…

WIP Sketch Book – Purple & Gold

Had a fairly productive weekend aside from the Friday.

• Painted the background quickly friday night for a new piece
• Painted in some pages of my sketch book
• Did a logo
• Did some quick brand standards
• Finished and submitted an illustration piece
• Did some more work in my sketch book

Here is one below that I’m still working on. I like tight, neat lines so I need to go over it with a biro and clean it up a bit.

Rest to follow eventually as I work my way through them.

Like the UKBA I have a large backlog of unfinished sketch book pages.

Purple & Gold

The Great Catscapade

I’ve come to a potentially life altering decision.

Luigi, my Bombay cat set to be the new internet sensation.

I’m tired of seeing these so-called ‘cute’ cats take to the stage when I know Luigi, the mastermind who wrangled his devious way into our house by being an adorable stray, who manipulatively demanded that he be petted nearly constantly (“These pitiful humans, they love to pet furry critters. Now they shall be in my power!”),

Who then like the mafioso he is really is, eliminated all competition by chasing away the other house cats, recruited a doltish henchmen (A similarly coloured, stupider cat, called Porky who waddles around behind his master.)

and who now rules the house with an iron fist in a velvet paw.

How is such a cat not destined for internet-meme-10-second greatness?

All I need is the co-operation of my parents, a selection of tiny hats and sunglasses and maybe a cigar or two.

I think I can get my gran to knit him a sweater once she recovers from her broken collar-bone.

Then I can sit back and wait for the millions to roll in!

Endorsements! Adverts! YouTube videos!

How can this plan fail??

The world and it’s Buzzfeeds, Reddits 4 chans and imgurs will be ours!!

BUWAHAHAHAHA!! Meow Hiss.

Luigi Sketch Final

Luigi perched on my mothers shoulder like (as Moof would say), a little Nazgul. Or as someone on FB said – Comma Cat. Clings nice and snug, like a comma on a sentence.

Cat Skyping with Mom & Leo

Compliment Confusion

I was strolling through one of those pop-up markets that appear in posh places (like Islington).

Very dangerous business indeed. Especially if you have a bit of cash jingling in your pockets. Nothing like a market to fleece you off it.

A lady at a stall said she loved my hat, and in a moment of compliment-haze-madness I was conned into buying one of her £8 bags of home-made hot chocolate.

£8.00

Fuck.

Imagine if every time someone paid me a compliment I handed over cash. What a dolt.

This better be the best frikkin hot chocolate I’ve ever had.

I’ll report back when I’ve tried it.

BTW: I have a MASSIVE backlog of images I havent uploaded (since August. Christ).

I know my 2.5 readers of this blog will be more than keen to wade through all those.

Sorting out the Barbara Cartlands

Sorting out the Barbara Cartlands

99.9% Real Gold Foil Cards! Bling Bling!

Ace King Queen.The ex got this back from the Punj. I didn’t realise they were real and I then spent 2 hours obsessing about it.

Joker. These come in a lovely wooden and felted box with the certificate in a pocket below. Plush! Why didn’t Bond use these in Casino Royale?

Authentic! Blew my mind a little.

V. Important Monday Morning Meeting Notes

The only photo I have of the stylish hat (Xmas gift from the ex)

Sketch Book – Y is for Vagina

Exploring a hairy and smooth font.
I figured Y was left out. ‘V’ is used far too much.

Sketch Book – Green Girl

Just a quick sketch book update.

Nothing much to report.

The ex returned, triumphantly from The Punj, complete with 4 massive suitcases full of stuff.

Spent 1.5 days scolding me into submission.

Ah, good to have things back to normal.

Bed time at a reasonable hour tonight (Like Cinderella, at midnight.)

Sketch Book_Green Girl Crop

Paan & Pet Peeve

I was reading a desi food blog about how to make paan so drew this. It’s just a bit of time pass.

If I had a company I’d name it ‘Timepass’.

I posted it on janineshroff.co.uk but forgot to on here.

Paan

I’ve been working on a new big drawing lately.

So trying to blog less because I can’t do both.

I was going to fill the windows up with thousands of tiny people crammed up to the glass, but now I think I’m going to use collages of photos of landfills.

Breeding sketch (A1)

Breeding sketch (A1) – Closeup work in progress

My pet peeve – Work in progress.

 

High Tea – Final

High Tea Final – A1 (Click to view large)

Something happens when you have a good time at a certain event, at a particular place.

It’s usually something that isn’t formulaic like a wedding or a birthday party, but might be what that happens after the wedding is over, unplanned and unorganised. It’s usually a spontaneous coinciding of all the forces.

After that one event, there is this great desire to re-create it, to pin down those spontaneous forces and make then reproduce themselves at your command. To create almost a tradition out of it.

Sometimes you nearly get there. It’s almost the same, but most of the time the harder you try to re-create the event, the further away it gets from the original.

Every year when I go home over Christmas I organise a little lawn picnic.

I drag out the chatais, the seating from the veranda benches and lots of cushions. My mother and I cut cucumbers and carrots sprinkled liberally with lime and chat masala and my mother whips up a cheesy dip. Much like a skinny, crankier Delia.

My mother also likes to organise the food, but since only a few people eat, there usually are left-overs to last a week

Which I have learned to try and avoid. Less is more. There are only so many times you can eat Biryani and Raita in one week before you’ve had it up to the eyeballs.

There’s usually some cocktail. Sometimes Pimms (we go through this quickly, Pimms is far too expensive to buy in India. My duty-free bottles last just about an afternoon), sometimes Sangria (that no one drank but me as I recall).

Once we’ve powered through the Pimms we settle for less picnicky drinks like rum or beers. Whatever is at hand.

Leo and I once invented this excellent cocktail. Here’s our secret (shhhh) recipe

• Mango juice
• Rum
• A scoop of Naturals Mango ice cream
• A couple of sprigs of mint

The first few times I organised the picnic I neglected to invite anyone.

(I use the word ‘organise’ loosely.)

It was on a weekday so the only people who could come were other loafers. Leo was on holiday, Anush is an academic (perpetual holiday) and we bullied Riddhi into leaving work early.

Our picnic lasted some 6 hours. We took a break from Cranium and the various other board games Riddhi carries around with her EVERY WHERE, (You can always count on Riddhi to bring games.) and went to Anush’s roof mid way through, then resumed on the lawn when Anush’s parent summoned him back home to catch his flight. (Anush is over 30. Just a note.)

We turned on the Christmas lights hung in the trees, got out the electric mosquito racket and burned chaklies in a ring of smoke around us (good disguise if you happen to be smoking mal) until past 1 am. A leisurely picnic all round.

Since then the numbers have gradually increased, and now I need to co-ordinate the guests fluctuating schedules.

I have to include Riddhi’s jing, who I suspect only hang out with me because of Riddhi. Riddhi’s boyfriend occasionally gets drunk and then picks a fight with Leo.

Frankly, it’s fucking exhausting. The chiller vibe has somewhat flown. Next year I’m not inviting anyone again.

So there.

That’s sort of what the drawing was based on. Trying to get back a perfect moment in a spontaneous event.

Anyway I finally finished this drawing. It lay around for ages. It’s like the Tea Party but much posher. Although my lawn picnic is in Bombay, this takes the English high tea as inspiration.

Close up 1

Close up 2. a nod to my lawn picnic set-up.

Close up 3. Girl in hat checking her phone.

Click here to buy a print or a skin

The Blue Pill Sunglasses

Sketch Book – Mask Pencil

It’s been a little over 2 weeks since I had my eye surgery. The patient, (that’s me) is meant to wear sun glasses for the first week, especially when outside.

Technically you can take them off after a week, but I find my eyes ache after many hours of staring at a computer screen, so I’ve taken to wearing them in the office.

I vary the range of my cheap, shitty, usually scratched, plastic sunglasses.

Some days it’s the pink ones (Hot pink, bee-like, the edges encrusted with diamante. Unholy things.) on others it’s my large yellow heart ones and more recently, a donated pair of fake blue and white Raybans.

One of the bosses at work protested at the yellow heart sunglasses. He couldn’t take me seriously, he said.

At first wearing sunglasses indoors made me feel rather dickish.

I’d apologise and explain, aware that some people would regard me with the same disdain I’ve regarded many a skinny-jean garbed louche who dared to wear sunglasses indoors. (and during an even less forgiving mood, wearing sunglasses on a cloudy day)

But once I got used to the idea of being rather dickish, (surprisingly quick turn around time getting used to dickishness) I confess I rather enjoyed it.

In the middle of the night especially. The is something deliciously twattish about wearing sunglasses in the middle of the night.

It’s like you’ve just arrived jet-lagged from a drug fuelled party with Pete Doherty and other sunglass wearing ponces on their private plane.

Having a justifiable medical reason to do it is just the chat masala on top of a juicy kala khatta gola.

Leo came over last friday and we spent a mellow couple of hours re-watching The Matrix: analysing, decoding, nit-picking. Generally tearing it to pieces. A pleasurable late night, post-dinner activity. (I’m taking a little detour around my sunglasses story, bear with me.)

I’ve noticed that at one point in the movie, Morpheus calls Neo, opening the call with

“This line is tapped, so I’ll be brief…”

And then immediately goes on to say,

“If they knew what I knew, you’d be dead… You’re the one Neo.”

Don’t fucking say that shit on a tapped line you fool!

He then tells Neo and any informant listening exactly where to meet his rebel crew.

In fact his entire conversation is exactly what not to say on a tapped line.

1. Mention you have a secret
2. Then give out that secret
3. Give out your location and time you’ll be at that location.

Jeez Morpheus.

Also why didn’t he just code Neo a magical phone that isn’t fucking tapped (like when he FedEx’s a phone to Neo’s office), or just message him on his computer?

Sketch Book – Mask Stage 2

Over the years of re-watching the Matrix (every time it’s on the TV, which is often, I’m compelled to leave it on.) I’ve often oscillated back and forth on the red-pill-blue-pill issue.

Leo usually humours me when I bring this up, (and I bring it up frequently, because for some reason it’s perpetually on my mind) since The Matrix 1 seems to be particularly of our generation.

So which pill would we choose? The Red or the Blue?

When I was a teen I remember watching the movie for the first time in the cinema with the girly jing that I hovered around back then,

After the movie ended one of the girls said

“I don’t know why he would take the red pill. I’d have taken the blue one.”

I immediately doused her with a massive bucket of scorn.

“Ugh! You’d take the blue pill? That’s SO lame! How can you possibly take the blue pill? Don’t you want the truth??”

Said with all the absolute conviction and derision that any teen worth their salt can muster.

I was so sure the red pill was the only pill worth taking.

Now as I’ve grown older, when I think about that girl’s statement I can’t fucking imagine why anyone would take the red pill. The real world is a pile of shit. Given the choice now, I’d prefer the blue pill.

But then each time I watch the movie from the start I agree with my obnoxious teenage self and think

“I’ll take the red pill. Of course I would. I want to be in control of my destiny!”

but if I watch the movie from somewhere in the middle it’s

“Nah, I’d take the blue. Dreams are nice.”

So I’ve developed some theories about the movie, the pill dilemma and why this circular thought process keeps happenening :

(again, bear with me, or if you prefer, skip to the bottom. I put a drawing up from my sketch book.)

Besides the philosophical aspects of the dream vs the truth I’ve come to the conclusion that the way Morpheus grooms Neo in the first 20/30 mins of the movie makes it virtually impossible to not take the red pill.

These are Morpheus’s grooming tactics:

He didn’t tell Neo it would be a bunch of garbage in the real world.

He says “The Matrix it can’t be explained, you have to see it for yourself”, when he could have quite easily said, “Look it’s a bit shit – It’s dark, robots keep trying to kill us and the food is terrible.” but he doesn’t.

Then he says, as a caveat, so Neo can’t later say “Fuck dude! You fucking groomed me!”  - “I’m only offering the truth nothing more.”

So really, Morpheus is like a sex offender.

He first speaks to Neo online, they develop a trust, then he builds on that trust.

He wants to meet, and takes Neo to some random run-down building in the middle of nowhere. (Classic.)

Then he coaxes Neo to take a drug.

What options did poor little Neo have? He was like a confused virgin with an internet pervert.

But aside from my take on The Matrix, I watched the entire movie wearing sunglasses on, lounging waaaay back in the sofa, like I had rubber-bendy bones and was in some sort of coma.

Every time I take my sunglasses off now I’m offended by the bright glaring harshness of everything. That fucking red-pill.

I know I’m going to have to stop sooner or later, but a part of me really wants to hang on to wearing sun-glasses 24/7.

Maybe it’s some compensation mechanism for not having glasses anymore.

Maybe I miss my glasses.

I would SO definitely eat the blue pill.

Mask – Final

Sketch Book – Goan Tiger (I mean Leopard)

This is a sketch I did in Goa, then ruined, then reconstructed.

There was this temple somewhere in Goa with a crude leopard and lion statue guarding its entrance. So when we got back to our huts I tried sketching it.

Initial sketch

I botched my first attempt drawing it.

So I drew another version above the first.

But I dislike ruined pages in my sketchbook so I decided to paint over the botched drawing in an attempt to rescue it somewhat.

My desk and my sketch book after I painted over the ruined page.

Make shift paint palette with hardened acrylic (the inside cover of my pencil kit) with a xerox of MJ and his masked children.

My trusty water colour pencils. Quite old now and generally neglected in favour of my felt pens and crayons.

Goa Tiger Sketchbook Final. Colour Pencils top & Acrylic bottom.

The ex said they prefered the botched page now because it looked very childish.

I rather like them both next to each other, in tandem as a contrast.