It probably doesn't happen often but the UN made my day today..

I just read this post about the cleanliness drive in Chattisgarh a tribal distric of India where everyone, traditionally, does their (excretion) business out in the bush. They're obviously (and its about time) cracking down on the practice now. This last sentence really cracked me up:

"To tackle this resistance, villages like Shankarpur and Shyampur in Bastar and Chatouna in Raipur decided to fine villagers who continued to practice open defecation and it has even been implemented with vigour in Bastar, where the Collector, Mr Ganesh Shankar Mishra, himself made surprise checks and penalised villagers."

I had this mental image of an official looking guy (in a white shirt, khaki shorts and old-time hunting cap) jumping out from behind a bush at some poor unsuspecting guy squatting under a tree (just innocently doing his business) and assailing him with the unicef's cleanliness policies. Picture of the look on the perp's face: priceless.
I made a quick little doodle but my camera battery's not co-operating so I'll try posting it tomorrow.

The very lonely princess..

Entry for the Illustration Friday topic Cars. Except its only one car..


When I read the topic the first thing that came to mind was trees as highways with cars driving along branches and treetrunks and resting on leaves (like ants foraging except with cars instead of ants...). However, on deliberating the matter further I settled on classic fairy tale style. Very gender specific I hear you say? Well its a fairy tale with a twist, the princess gets tired of waiting for the knights and drives down the tree and off to new adventures. Well she couldn't keep honking and flicking her headlights forever you know, batteries aren't inexhaustible! Besides there's a 10'o'clock curfew at the royal garage. Click on the image and go to 'view all sizes' to read the narrative.
Illustration done on paper with watercolour pencils and then..-watered. Apologies for the wonky'ness of the image, I don't have a scanner so I used a digital camera to upload it!

Back again! (With a bug-y favicon!!)

Its 11:05 PM here (in New Zealand) and I just thought I'd put up a quick post. I've been trying to change the little icon (a 'favicon'-word of the day!) up there in the URL bar of my page. I've turned it into an abstract (butterfly-like) shape. The code seems to have some bugs in it though, sometimes it shows up, sometimes the blogger favicon shows up, and sometimes the internet explorer default shows up... I wonder if the butterfly is visible to anyone else? (Perhaps it only exists in my head.. :O)

In case anyone wants to know, this is how I did it:

Step 1: I found this really nice tutorial on making abstract shapes in Adobe Illustrator through Smashing Magazine.

Step 2: Played around a bit with the advice in the tutorial and finally settled on one I liked.

Step 3: Then I found this lovely tutorial on how to make a favicon in Photoshop and used it to turn the butterfly shape into a favicon.

Step4: I then uploaded the favicon to my flickr address (tried uploading it to myfavatar as suggested here but that didn't work because of glitches in the site. So I just reconfigured the code so kindly provided one the same page to accomodate a flickr image. And voila! I have a favicon! (Well.. in most browsers anyway... supposedly IE6 can't see png files or favicons in general...) Anyway I'll be pottering around tweaking things and hopefully changing the blog for the better!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!/ Happy Holidays!

Going home for the holidays

Yay! I finally submitted my thesis yesterday! Its such a load off! I've been in the lab till ubsurdly late hours these past few weeks! My colour pencils and drawing books are all gone (the movers've been through and the house is almost empty) so I drew this sketch on a bit a packing paper they left behind :) Its called 'Going home for the holidays'!
Happy holidays everyone!



I've been meaning to draw this one for a while 'cuz of this documentary I saw about elephants in the Andaman and Nicobar (or was it Daman and Dui?) islands of the coast of South India. People there actually go from island to island on the backs of elephants! It was amazing seeing how graceful and light those great pachderms seemed in the water! And the water was so crystal clear it seemed just as if they were flying!
So I've drawn the elephants flying home to their island and happily gambolling in the sea. (Junior seems to have dropped Grandpa, but that's alright its all water below... ;)

No new posts for a while...

I haven't posted in weeks and likely won't be posting till the new year. I've been busy working on my thesis. So for ppl that actually check on this blog from time to time (thanks for all the support!) no new posts in the next few weeks guys, sorry about that!
Take care and happy holidays!

Thanksgiving for Illustration Friday

I offer thanks for every living creature that has escaped a cruel fate at the hands of humanity.



Asian bears (such as the malaysian sun bear and the himalyan black bear) are particularly threatened by the use of bear gall bladder extract in traditional chinese medicine. The bears are captured, kept in small rusty cages and a metal pipe is stabbed into their body to extract their bile. They are in continuous pain because of the pipe and the subsequent bacterial infections they get and often chew their own paws off in agony.

....I'm so sorry bringing up all this sad stuff during your Thaksgiving holiday. Its just... I feel so sad and helpless when I see stuff like this, and there's fabulists like Mr. Make-believe here that only have to open their mouths to make things worse.

Thankfully there are sane people out there (www.wildaid.org and www.wspca.org) that are making a difference. Please, please, please If you know anyone that makes use of this stuff tell them NOTHING extracted from an animal is going to have any medicinal effect because it is protein, which means its made up of the SAME amino acids you get from all the other food you eat. Plus it gets broken down by the acid in your stomach so fat chance its going to retain whatever magical medicinal property its supposed to possess!
Sigh...
Rant over. Thank you for your patience!