Here's the second strip of the second Comic Konga!. Click on the image to see the full strip.

This was actually the first strip drawn but I wanted to post it after the single panel from yesterday. Tomorrow's strip has been penciled; I only have to ink and scan it, perhaps shade it in like this one. Like I said yesterday I think I'm not going to do full colour versions (Today's strip is done in shades of desaturated blue). For no other reason than, like most Indians, I have a bit of a lenient hand with colour and it always ends up gaudier than I would like (strangely this is only a problem with my illustration work; my colour sense works fine when I'm doing design).

V

So begins the second Comic Konga! I think I'm starting to like doing the first one as a single panel gag; it's a format I never otherwise use, and it's a challenge to distill something down to one panel and one line only. Like most writers I have a tendency to ramble, and something like this could easily have been a three or six panel piece.

The anatomy and line-work is all over the place, and I did try to colour it but decided just to keep it to black and white (perhaps that can be a theme for this time's CK). Hope your own comic endeavours are fruitful. Can't wait to see what you lot have come up with.

V

The last time I updated the Work page was probably sometime in 2005. This was back when the site was still on free hosting and looked all grey and lime green.

Yeah, it's been a long time. Quite a bit has happened since then, not least of which is this redesign. I've always wanted to redo the work page, make it richer and more than just a bunch of images, but then I realised that while I was putting that off for the right time (it would be a good deal of work), two years had gone by.

So, I bit the bullet, sorted through my work and came up with a bunch of stuff -- some of which has been posted on the journal before -- but much of which is new. So surf on over to the work page and have a look around. There's about 30 new things in the Design and Illustration sections. I haven't added anything to photos yet, and might do so in the coming weeks.

V

It's been far too long since I've posted here, and even longer since our first Comic Konga! Half a year has gone by in the blink of an eye, and so I thought it would be best to get back into blogging by jumping in at the deep end with another CK.

CK2 will begin July 7th (that's Monday after next) and run until the 11th (that Friday). The rules are the same as last time: five days, five comics (in whatever way you define a 'comic') posted to your blog or online space of choice. A free-form festival of graphic delights, hosted by your truly.

You have about twelve days so that should be plenty of time to come up with ideas, doodle, and even prepare your finished comics. If you're participating do drop me an emial or a comment here (don't forget a link to where you'll be putting the work up!).

See you then!

Over the past five years I've been amassing an eclectic collection of cheap used books on my trips to Bombay. At Rs.10 apiece (around $0.25 US) they aren't expensive or significant (most of them are, in fact, the very opposite), but they are valuable to me, insomuch as they are weird -- and I love weird. I have read very few of them; Of the hundreds (and by now, thousands), I have only finished a handful. There have been plans ever since I started blogging to talk about them, to read and review them, but this has so far not happened.

I was reminded of this recently when Dan blogged about his bookshelf, and in the comments I lamented that most of my books were in boxes (he suggested I just take a picture of the box). "That's it," I said to myself, "enough dawdling!" I looked through a small box of them and chose seven -- none of which I have read -- but which I think are interesting. Maybe this will give me the impetus to actually read some, but for now I will talk of their weird and wonderful subjects, their pretty and often breathtaking covers, and their all-round coolness. I hope you find them as fun as I do.

Comic Konga has begun!

I figured I'd start out simple with a one-panel. My first idea was to have the same idea done over three or four panels but I think the joke doesn't really need anything more than one.

This was done in pencil, coloured in inkscape and put together in the GIMP. Word balloons in Inkscape. It's a bit of a fractured process, I know, but I prefer the quick flexibility of laying down colour shapes in a vector program but need the layer manipulations of a bitmap one like GIMP to keep it looking natural.

(Yes, I know it's 4 am. Still technically Monday, though)