Well it has been a while since my last post. My agent, Janet DeCarlo, in Dover Plains NY (www.storybookartsinc.com) has been keeping me burning the mid-night oil. I've done a cover for a tarot book, and a book for Sundance Publishers on Native American Legends, through a production company in Chicago called Quarasan. You can see a few of the images for the latter with this post.
Now I am back to Pokiri Parrot as I promised the publisher final sketches by the end of the year. The committee-based decisions slowed down approval of the sketches and have pushed this deadline well into the new year. I've decided to work on it between other projects when I have the time and hope to have it done by the end of April.
In the meantime The Mountain that Loved a Bird is about to go to press in India and in Turkey. The Rajhiv Ghandi Foundation will be funding an Urdu version to send to Kashmir. All good news. We are still hunting for a Spanish publisher. Lectorum has committed to distributing it in the US.
Also Sonu & the Metal Elephant has finally been published by Scholastic India as wll as The Ice Berries both stories that I co-wrote with Sylvia Sikundar. The latter appears in an anthology entitled The Puffin Book of Bedtime Stories and they did a wonderful job with the production, The soft cover has an appealing pillow-like feel to it.
More on Pokiri soon. I promise! Today I did a photo shoot with Neerja a young model who will play Rajkumari in this exciting new book. She was adorable and proved to be the perfect character dressed in her choli.

That wicked Ojha, look what he's done!
The background to this image was done in traditional watercolour, with a few digital tweaks to pull it together. The original character sketch was done with a 2B pencil on 'real' archival paper. The final colour was then added to the character using the airbrush tool in Painter 9. The layers were then combined in Photoshop CS2, adding swish lines etc. Good thing too, with all of the editorial changes that are taking place on this assignment.
You can't beat the digital media for flexibility. In fact I bring the sketches into the background first before the final renderings on the character so that I can see how they flow in the entire piece.
The background here is the Quitab Minar, an historic site in New Delhi. Interesting that this piece was being painted while bombs were going off in the markets of Delhi...and the editor thought that the character was a bit too Moghul looking.

I remember the first time I saw Emily Carr's painting of an enormous pine tree in the National Gallery of Canada. I was so inpsired by the movement in that painting, seen from underneath with a few swirling movements of oil on paper that capture the essence of the growth of the tree as if your soul is being swept up through the branches, whirling and twirling to the crown. Ever since I have been fascinated by movement in art from Maurice Duschamps, Nude descending a staircase, in its attempt to capture movement in multiple frames on one canvas to children's book art which requires the capture of movement in images that also tell a story. Above is the horrible Ojha swooping down from the Quitab Minar in New Delhi to capture Pokiri Parrot and whisk him away to lands unseen.

I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows. (Emily Carr)

Hanging out with Ojha, I feel like I am getting to know him...in all his evil bird-eating ways. In contrast to that, Rajkumari has become younger, more cherubic and all-round cute.

Well I have finally started to nail down this character and I'm seeing him in my dreams...the rotten SOB - killing all those birds. Ironic that at the same time I am doing a special issue for Biodiversity Journal on Conservation of the World's Birds.
So, here is Ojha as he scoops up Pokiri the parrot. There will be several of these scenes. Due to the wonders of digital technology I can plunk him into the background that has already been completed. First I'll print him directly onto watercolour paper, paint him up, rescan the image, tweak him around in Photoshop, add him into the background, some more tweaks and then drop the whole image into InDesign CS2 so I can see how that page works with the rest of the book.
More on this process later.

Well finally the sketch of Ojha has been approved....and isn't it interesting how close to home inspiration can be found. I used myself and my talon-like fingers, honed by years of clasping onto my pencil, to model for the bird-thieving Ojha. Click on the images for a closer view.
A poem, The Bird-man of Rajasthan, also rose out of the ashes!

BIRD-MAN OF RAJASTHAN

The Bird-man of Rajasthan,
A side-bag for his prey,
Flies on velcro vulture-wings,
For a thieving get away.

With hungry sunken cheeks,
And large gaping jaws,
Gnarled boney fingers,
With nails as long as claws.

Swooping in a lightning flash,
With a screeching reaching cry,
He’ll catch you in his clasping claws,
And squeeze you till you die!

In flowing robes of stealth,
A soaring silent sight,
All gentle winged creatures,
Scatter out of fright.

This response to "How bad is bad?" from Anastasia Suen when I posted on my CW-biz list serv:
"I say, make him mean, so that we can really rejoice when he is
defeated! [I'm assuming the good guys win in this one!]
:-) Anastasia "

Yes, the good girl wins in the end and the evil Ojha is carried away by the eagles...serves him right!

And another response:
"I agree with Anastasia. Avoid the mischievous look if possible. Completely
evil is good. There is a good book out about how children learn good vs
evil by books - "Dragons on the Landscape" Michael Brown.

I remember a children's book - Diamond in the Window - Jane Langton - that
had a very scary page with an evil jack-in-the-box picture. I could not
turn the page and look at that creature - but I loved the anticipation and I
would read and re-read the story. I knew it was evil. That made the
children's victory all the more meaningful in the storyline."
Thanks Mary! ...and I'm going to check out that book.
The above images of some of natures's other nasties were done a few years back for an E-book, "The Hobyhas", published by a Swiss publisher.

OK my editor agreed that my colour illustrations of Ojha looked like a "typical" tantric magician but did not look EVIL enough. The revisions called for larger wings, longer claws, perhaps a bag of dead birds slung from the shoulder that explains how Ojha gets his flying power from winged prey. I have shown my first sketch with editoral notes gleaned from my conversation with the editor. Problem is, Ojha is starting to look more like me all the time...I'm not going to read too much into this and you had better not either.

So then there were the different views of the same character. Since I work digitally to a great extent, I create my characters separately, usually in watercolour (in this case with some coloured pencil for highlights) and then add the character to the background which may be created in the same medium or not. Here are more images of the same character. I'll show later how these are then placed into the backgrounds which will make up the final page image. The placement of text will be addressed at a later date.

Characters can vary wildly from one culture to another. The wicked character in one culture may look like an average Joe in another and what is considered a hero for a North American may have entirely different connotations in another culture. My editor wanted a tantric magician...not quite the skulls hanging around the neck look but maybe a mala of human teeth or teeth of some kind. But I still wanted it to be kid-friendly. I still remember promising to take my neighbours 7 year old out for Halloween when I was a teenager. I showed up with my friends, dressed as goblins for the occasion and poor little Scottie would not, under any circumstances, leave the house with us. No way! Since then I've thought to always have a little bit of a twinkle, even in my evil characters so as not to scare the jeebies out of my readers. Here's what I came up with for Ojha the wicked. This guy is definitely a tantric and that's what the editor ordered.