Another Project Completed.

Posted on October 15, 2014 by jaajaabor

Last year I started a project to illustrate Hindi alphabets. Having looked at the numerous and beautifully illustrated english alphabet books for pre-schoolers, I thought it would be nice to do the alphabet series myself. My daughter loves animal pictures so I set off with theme of incorporating cute land & sea animals, birds and nature into the drawings.

I gave myself a time frame but I got delayed. 10 months have gone by and finally, FINALLY this project is now complete. I have posted some progress images of this project here , here and here. In case you are not following my Facebook page, you may have missed out some of the illustrations I did so here is a compiled image of all the letters of the Hindi alphabet:

My client (my daughter) is very happy with the outcome and I am happy she is happy. I intend to refine it a bit more, put in some proper Hindi font (instead of my own handwriting) and create a wall poster for the children’s room but that will have to wait a little while longer. I will keep you posted.

Phir MIlenge!!

Alphabet project

Posted on December 15, 2013 by jaajaabor

Here is a little update on my Hindi alphabet project- I have drawn concept sketches for all but one letter and also have drawn final drawings for almost 12 out of 50 letters in the alphabet.

The theme that I chose to work with animals or the living world with a dash of cuteness and wordliness. I am digitally drawing the images so that I can create a power-point for my daughter later to show this on a screen.

Out of the fifty letters in the Hindi alphabet, four are known as khaali (empty) letters. These letters can be part of words but have no word beginning from them. In an online discussion my friend Suzi came up with the idea that these were probably the naughtiest of the letters and therefore could never be in the front of the line. I liked the thought but it wasw hard to represent so I came up with the idea of sad monsters taking these naughty letters away.

As always feedback is welcome. For the complete album CLICK HERE.

Phir Milenge!!

Alphabutter

Posted on November 23, 2013 by jaajaabor

That’s what my almost 3 yr old daughter calls alphabets- Alpha-butter.

I am trying to teach her hindi alphabet nowadays and for the want of cute looking hindi alphabet graphic books, I decided to make one myself. What better use to put my drawing skills to! The theme I narrowed down upon is the animal/plant/natural world with a dash of cuteness (that is what she likes!).

There are almost 50 alphabets in the hindi language including the vowels and the consonants. The vowels also have a separate symbols system called matraa which when used with the consonants produces sounds.The problem however is finding the right word to fit an alphabet. There are some consonants that have no word that begins with them – they are part of lots of words but no word that actually starts with them. I have been struggling with some to be quite honest.

So now I am putting my struggle out there – out on social media asking friends to help out. Here is a list of alphabets (circled) for which I need suggestions. Suggest names of animals or activities they might be doing or something in the natural world that can be used. You’ll also see here a sneak-peek of the kind of graphics I am creating. alphabet list Scan 8 If you have any friends and family who know the Hindi Language, please feel free to share this link with them.

Phir Milenge!!

Work in progress- Shepherd boy

Posted on April 10, 2013 by jaajaabor

Taking an inspiration from Paige Keiser’s blog, I have decided to share some work in progress pictures here ( she has been sharing some pages from a dummy book where she has tried some different layouts/ coloring schemes for her book’s pages). I am starting to develop new ideas about a picture story book for my daughter and this would hopefully be a good platform to discuss the narrative and the drawing composition, aesthetics, colour palette . I am still in the draft stage of character development and haven’t finalized ‘the look’. Hopefully by the time I am through with putting this dummy together I will have a much clearer idea.

Here’s dummy page 1:

The Shepherd boy- the starting point.

I traced and coloured my sketch digitally. first with the bright and dark colours that I usually gravitate towards and later with a muted colour scheme.