Since I've been doing little else, I thought I might as well put up some photos.

Of late I've been trying to take more photos of the country I live in. After 12+ years of living here, and coming from a place like India that is infinitely more visually chaotic, it becomes a bit of an effort to keep boredom from setting in. I can't say I'm taking better photos here now than perhaps I ever did, and I still yearn for a place that isn't just desert and buildings and malls, but I'm trying.

Recently I finally looked into this whole cross-processing look I've always liked, and how to introduce them into my own photos. After appying the knowledge of a few tutorials and a couple of GIMP plugins and scripts (including my favourite GEGL C2G method) I've come up with these.

They're all a bit over the top -- nobody said Indians were subtle and I am, in that regard at least, 100% desi -- but I do like the strangeness the techniques bring to otherwise bland, brown and grey photos of the UAE. Here's six more examples.

More catching up! I drew this on paper last September, on an A4 sheet using a light blue marker for the sketch, and then various black pens to lay down inks. The good thing about this method is that you can then scan the piece in grayscale mode and any amount of rough sketch lines magically disappear! (You can see this in the sketch version below)

Colored in the Gimp, of course, using a woefully-neglected graphics tablet. Actually there was a fourth figure in this, but it was so horribly drawn (a last minute add to fill up the page) that I decided to erase her from the colored version. This is what the original page looked like:

Another image I'd done early in the year also features our lovable interdimensional tourist, and involved food, of a sort. I just realised I hadn't posted it here on the site:

I should really be drawing a whole lot more.

V

It's been a while since I just did something for the heck of it. Designers usually like to make such work sound important by labeling it a 'personal project', but I like to think of it more like a sketch or drawing practice -- a Design Doodle!

This piece resulted from a process that is the essence of doodling. There was no plan, no idea, no concept in my head. I simply looked through a random folder of photos I'd taken, picked one, cross-processed it in the GIMP until it looked nice, then imported it into inkscape and went from there. After about an hour of work on it there was a 'click' in my head that said it was done, and that was that.

It was stream-of-consciousness design!

I hope to do more of these, probably one a week, maybe more. It always helps to keep practicing, to keep the gears of your mind charged, and client work or large projects can sometimes be too serious for that. It also feels great to start and finish something in one sitting.

Go out and play, just spend and hour doing 'nothing' -- and you may end up with something you like very much.

V

I've been trying to get back into cooking again. Like a lot of things cooking is as much about practice as it is about something as indefinable as 'talent'. So this, then, is three lunches I've made over the past week or two. None of them tasted as good as I would like, but hey, you know what they say about practice...

Thai green curry with vegetables

An all day breakfast-esque plate of sausages, spinach, eggs, and crispy fried breadcrumbs

Stir fry egg noodles

V

As is typical, I went to IKEA for one thing and ended up with something else. In this case, the one thing was a shower curtain (which I did end up buying, though I seem to have forgotten about it) and the impulse buy was a potted chrysanthemum plant.

It was beautiful. It was cheap. I mean, really: it cost less than a coffee at Starbucks. I've shied away from keeping plants at home since I live in an apartment with not a whole lot of sunlight. In Oman we used to live in a villa which had a fairly large garden, and perhaps in envy of those times I've never considered putting some in my new concrete jungle surrounding.

Recently, however, I picked up a little basil plant, and three months later its new leaves have been tiny, but at least it hasn't died on me.

Next step, a trough-shaped planter for my sill, more herbs, and maybe even a few more flowering plants!

V

There's nothing like a small stack of freshly cut business cards. I have so far, in my eight-year-old(!) design career, had about five or six designs for my business card. I change them about every year or so, and that's not just to keep them fresh and interesting (mostly to me) but because I've never printed more than twenty or thirty of any one design.

No, there is no pack of five hundred or one thousand little rectangles of card stock with my name on it sitting around gathering dust. I take my design with crop marks to an ordinary copy shop and get a page or two (holding eight to ten cards each) printed on their good laser printer with card stock (250 gsm). It's cheap, effective, and means I don't have to be stuck to a single design for long.

This is a good thing for a small business or freelancer, as we don't have the kinds of numbers of clients that a person in an agency might field. If I'm not going to meet more than a dozen or two potential clients a year, why bother with hundreds of cards?

It's also a lot of fun to come home and cut them up (use adult supervision, kids!). You always feel that that 250 gsm paper is too floppy, but once cut into individual shapes believe me, they behave and feel just like any normal business card should.

This year's business card for Primordial Soop (the little design monster my brother & I run) turned out to be a bit strange. I've wanted to put something other than the usual biz card staples of name, contact and services offered, and came up with a bit of conversation. I hope you like it.

V

Possibly the most common sight in Dubai -- the tail lights of several cars in front of you, that is. :)

Post-processed in the GIMP, using some of the GEGL Black & White Conversion Method I've outlined here, while keeping th original colour layer, adding in some more on top and generally freewheeling it until it looked right.

V

I'm very much an 80s kid. I grew up with Transformers and G.I. Joe, not Rugrats and Ed, Edd n Eddy. Though I did spend a good chunk of my childhood in the 90s, growing up in Muscat, away from the twin cultural juggernauts of India and the US, meant that some things arrived later, and stayed around more. And 80s cartoons, and a love of the toys that came with the subculture, is one of those things.