spooky nights!

I've been getting strange dreams for a few days in a row now! And what better than to put up a post on Halloween!

I know it isn't a big thing here except for the parties which happen where everyone dresses up like a well oiled black cat with a lot of bling :) I've read a lot about this whole pumpkin craze and have always wanted to carve my own pumpkin. As a kid i used to always be on the lookout for a huge orange vegetable to carve on and as soon as i'd find a vegetable vendor, he'd have already cut the not so orange pumpkin into slices. I doubt anybody would appreciate eating pumpkin pulp for a week at my place anyway so it's good i didn't get my hands on one. The thing which used to fascinate me the most was this whole 'trick-or-treat' business. Candy is my biggest weakness and i'd do anything to dress up and get candy for being a cute ghost or something!

Anyway!
Random doodles in the good spirit of this curious holiday!

Thanks for looking!

pumpkin flavoured cupcakes would be strange

my cat fascination kicks in!

small small...

Just a post jury update of some digital and sketchy stuff. My eye infection seems to have subsided , and with that i've learnt to put eye-drops by myself as well. It's so much easier when someone is putting it for you, such small luxuries are always easily overlooked.Hence the saying 'you don't know what you've gotten until it's gone' holds so true.

2009, NID cats love sleeping and i love them so, even if they scratch me or go bipolar on me!

Summer sets in so quickly in Ahmedabad,before my jury 2009

The NID design fest poster which i made
with typography very patiently added
 by my Graphic Design Junior Pragun Agarwal.
 Many many thanks to him.

Winter is my favourite time of the year!

My Skyrim character enjoying some sweet rolls and mead
at the Thalmoor embassy. Another summer time doodle

Here's a song which i've always enjoyed, and probably goes with the mood i'm in right now as well.

sigh...

My jury has gotten postponed and the lineup for presentations has changed as well! And as luck has it, i have come down with an eye infection, something which goes by the name 'allergic conjunctivitis'. I can barely keep my eyes open when i'm travelling , and i feel this constant prickling sensation in my eyes.

At the moment i look super sick and i feel like pulling my eye out. But i'm glad that my jury will get over tomorrow and i can finally start working on animating my classroom project!
I feel like putting an eye patch and going for my jury tomorrow :D

Cup O'Doodle 2

Heres a second attempt for one of the  http://cupodoodle.blogspot.in/ doodles.

 And in other news.. the weather is terrible in Ahmedabad! Juries for our animation batch is on the 18th and 19th of October, end of this week, good luck to everyone! :)

Celebrating louwe :3

In February 2012 i decided that i wanted to do something really really awesome for my valentine. I had done some bookbinding and made a sketchbook for his birthday in 2011 but it never saw the light of day because i chickened out when it came down to making a final sketchbook cover for it.

So there i was staring at the naked sketchbook and i decided that i MUST make something for a cover page and surprise Parth as well as give him a very good reason to start sketching regularly again.

Here's my final book cover which i got printed from the  I.T. centre. The book had to be left alone pressed by a very heavy weight for a day before i could wrap it further with some clear plastic so that the print doesn't get ruined.

That evening we ate food at a Lebanese restaurant here in Ahmedabad called 'Souq' enjoyed some good hummus and pita bread :)

Thanks for looking!

don't click on me, i'm a CMYK print and i drastically change colours when previewed   

Birthday!

To my very dear friend Srija, hope you have a lovely birthday! I'm a day late, so sorry for that.
Cheers to our lovely escapades in school and i hope that you always stay the same crazy person that you have been for the years i've known you. Many happy returns of the day!

Cup O'Doodle

I came across a wonderful blog  http://cupodoodle.blogspot.in/ and they seem to have a weekly ritual where a few doodly lines are handed over for artists to interpret in anywhich way they want to. So here's my first go at it.

Thanks for looking!

Bearly Sleeping

With the juries coming up, i've 'bearly' been sleeping. The funny thing is, i haven't been working too much either, this strange state of being is a very very unhealthy lifestyle to keep especially if i want to keep my brain .. how should i say this... "fresh"!

Summer time part 2

Now summer time part two involves making a lot of avatars for my dear friend Ishaan. He wanted a gamer guy for his blog there were a few requests which i made, i still have a star wars request pending :/  But heres the stuff i ended up making

Thanks for looking! :)

So here we have normal gamer guy, halo enthusiast gamer guy, younger chibi type gamer guy,
dragon ball z cosplay gamer guy

summer time

The summer of 2012 was spent in Bombay interning at Turner Broadcasting. Whenever i found some free time i was constantly working on photoshop and painting things everyday.
I've always been a HUGE fan of digital painting and i've always found my attempts to be less than perfect and thankfully, this feeling helps me paint more and more everyday, because you never know what effect you'll come up with each time.

I've just put together some stuff from this summer
I enjoyed doing all of them because there were so many things which i kept figuring out every time i picked up that stylus.

my first, my hands got terribly tired after this

sick of strokes so i decided to do some vector stuff. This was made in fond memory of a doodle i n my best friend's sketchbook

a fox never ceases to amuse me, i wish i could make dress fold better. This dress looks like a fondant cake

lets forcibly make some stuff so that i can calm my paranoid self into believing that i'm still capable of doing digital painting

Egypt is such a lovely place, animal worship is so divine

Fan art for the french movie 'Le Chat du Rabbin' or 'Rabbi's Cat'

I forgot to add that i have a deep mermaid fascination as well

Parth was very happy when Diablo 3 came out and so was i, if he plays it then i do too :D

Draw this again

I came across a few artists on DeviantArt who had done this exercise where they'd dig out a very old piece of artwork and redraw it to see the way they've progressed over the years.

I found this idea rather interesting and decided to do one of my own.

Thanks for looking! :)

Game of Thrones

I was introduced to watch the first season of Game of Thrones by force by my friend last year. That force was worth it because nowadays thats the only thing i think of, i love everything about the series.. i love the books, i love the characters and i love the title sequence at the beginning!

I was so grateful that i decided to make a doodle for my friend who is an avid fan of Jon Snow. I tried making Ghost as well :)
Another one of those doodles made just for fun

Runescape and beyond...

I started playing runescape back when i was in 8th grade, i think this is around 2005 maybe?
Either way, there was this character who was using flashy text to sell his wares at the fishing port in Karamja island. Now i really badly wanted to learn how to go about doing that so i asked that character and he promised to teach me only if i gave him a bunch of swordfish. It was a good deal since i was a reasonably high leveled character and could afford to fish all that lost swordfish back. Indians always seem to find each other on online games it seems.. and i've known that character ever since.
Heres to our friendship cemented by swordfish :D

It's another friend's birthday as well today so heres a quick doodle i made for him, Happy Birthday Lehri!-blogger will probably post this as 6th of october :/-

CGI yes yes

From our CGI workshop last semester.
We were basically given a rigged Madagascar monkey using which we had to animate a very very short film. I'll take this opportunity to thank a very talented junior who so enthusiastically gave his voice for my monkey. Thank you Upamanyu for such a wonderful voice over

CGI workshop from Aakanksha Mittra on Vimeo.

Thanks for looking :)

i annoy people very easily
2010

thinking about crabs and tender legs
2010

i've always wanted a squirrel as a pet
2010

small sketchbook doodles

doodles from a puny sketch book from 2010 ,images contain references of centaurs, vikings,mermaids, Aion by NCsoft. Fun fun fun!

There are days when i feel hopelessly alone

something fishy

First year of animation, tea would eagerly fall on one's sketchbook in the night mess.
Having fun with spilt tea and my black gel pen.

Character deisgn

Character design was one heck of a course! we were given a skeleton story which we had to flesh out using characters based on a car which we sketched out even before we knew the skeleton story.

So it's basically something like, we sketched out a car based on a few property constraints, after which we were provided with a story where we had to fit in events and characters in accordance to our car. Here our protagonist was the inventor of the car, a supportive friend on the side and a somewhat grim reaper-esque villain

A few sketches and models

My protagonist

Friend of the protagonist

The villain, death bringer basically

A few sketches tracing my journey till i reached my final characters

Character design from Aakanksha Mittra on Vimeo.

Walk cycle for my protagonist

Character design 1 from Aakanksha Mittra on Vimeo.

Walk cycle for my villain

I mostly used a colour pencil to rough out my characters and then used a brush pen to see what all i could come up with. The skeleton story was such that it could be twisted into the most personalized stories. Making my characters go through the story was a great experience, i had to plan all the things they'd do and the way they would react to different situations
A very enriching experience for sure!

Thanks for looking!

Batchmates!

There were times during our basic animation module when i used to get thoroughly bored when our work was being reviewed. Selfishly, i'd sit down to draw right after mine was done. That day i decided to dedicate one page each to my animation batchmates, drawing them out the way they seemed in a fantasy setting. I tried colouring my first two with watercolours and ended up leaving the rest just inked.

From left to right -
Abhishek , i tried making him look like an exquisite royal with a lot of panache! i've always found him to be very very royal and larger than life.

Ketki, is a princess who chills in her awesome castle. Some people just got it good like that.

Venky, is the head of the gallows and oversees the executions with his rhythmic headbanging(he's such a talented musician and enjoys his music thoroughly) and spiked mace.

Kirat, the wood elf. Always on his nimble toes using magic and his skilled hands to hunt and defeat monsters. He has bad eyesight and has conjured up a pair of spectacles which the elf tribe calls a miracle eye healer.

Nilomee, the arabian enchantress. She enjoys tumbling and dancing about in her palace.

I still have a few batchmates whom i did not sketch that day, so i'll probably get back to doing it now after two years!  So as of now, this post will be continued further, sometime in the near future :)

Thanks for looking!

a self reflective course!

As is tradition in NID, we have a course known as 'science and liberal arts' every semester. This post is regarding one of the earliest SLAs(science and liberal arts) we had with a very lovable faculty!
We were told to illustrate two self portraits which could encompass the way we feel about ourselves and the world.

All three portraits had me sewing my very own blanket of dreams, full of imaginary beings and environments, cordoned off my the outside world. Almost like i'm floating in my very own bubble unaware of the world which waits beyond it.

using junk material to create a self portrait, i used some punched put shapes from
the animation lab paper puncher. cut up a tetra pack of Tropicana apple
 and scavenged the textile studio for some cloth scraps and yarn.

an earlier version of the portrait, just a simple illustration
inked on paper from which i took que to make the junk portrait.
This was the very first attempt at a self portrait for the course.

one of my first digital paintings, we had to pick a
certain painting style for the very same self portrait,
 i tried to somewhat work with surrealism,
but it seems more real than surreal no?

Thanks for looking :)

lets animate...

When i first joined the animation discipline in college, i was probably excited beyond repair and was imagining some crazy Miyazaki wonders to instantly erupt from my pencils. But gosh was i wrong, without any prior training in drawing and having self learnt most of my life, i was petrified. Never did i find a blank piece of paper so intimidating and never did i loathe drawing so much.

Yes, we started with the basic bouncing ball and went on to hammers and axes, slowly progressing to walk cycles and scarves waving in the air. Animating is certainly no child's play and i realized soon enough why my seniors would warn us everyday when they saw us with our light boxes in the studio.

It's a tough journey ahead, and now even in my fourth year, i still struggle with many many things which seem almost impossible to animate.
I had made this illustration out of frustration one day when our coordinator Sekhar Mukherjee was dismissing all our hammer animations.

A small and very old test animation i made just for fun when i was bored. More catty animations in the future i hope!

Parachute cat from Aakanksha Mittra on Vimeo.

making words move

So there was 3rd year of animation where we had a course called "motion typography" we were firstly given a famous personality whose essence we had to convey with the help of movement, i chose Monroe. Secondly we had to choose from three movies and make a whole new title sequence for it. I , being such a sucker for Audrey hepburn chose to take up 'My Fair Lady'


Motion Typography from Aakanksha Mittra on Vimeo.

Illustration with Priyankar Da

During our second year of animation at the National Institute of Design, we had an illustration course with our alumini faculty Priyankar Gupta. Some of the final results of the course :)

my illustrated view of the phrase "no place to swing a cat" inspired by the popular dance form 'swing'

a series of postcards from Manipur, done with the painful crowquill

a monochrome illustration which had to catch an essence of the story "Toba Tek Singh by Sadat Hasan Manto " 

an endangered species poster which had to only have the word "save" on. it. I chose to bring the African Wild Dog into the lime light!

Thanks for looking! :)

some more sketch updates!

why hello!

So this is me, FINALLY starting my very own blog, it's title lovingly inspired from my favourite game series- the elder scrolls. Just posting a few old sketches for now

 

most of the animal sketches were early sketches from when our faculty took us to a glorious cantonement where soldiers trained with horses!

And then the usual scenes from in and around our campus...