This is a BIG announcement!!! I have recently launched my own website.

On it, I will be writing weekly on the blog Let me tell you more.

Posts about Nani's Visits and all of my other work will now be found there!

What are you like?

This exercise was our first task at Gustavo Puerta's workshop: 

The Illustrator's Reading (La Lectura del Ilustrador) 

at the Escuela Peripatética 

(at which I seem to be an eternal student and happily so!).

It's origin is a Victorian children's game of drawing objects or beings that you identify yourself with, in the aim of telling a little story of who you are and what you are like.

Original artwork

Hot off from the printers and the colouring begins!

Final result

to begin the year with love, wine and celebration...

an excerpt from The Rubayaat by Omar Khayyam

happy...

...holidays

Having many homes

this is a little game or puzzle i made 

this summer at a workshop of Andre da Loba's.

Recently I have been thinking a lot about 

the idea of changing homes, 

of moving from one place to another. 

There are always people, places 

and things you leave behind. 

But then there are also the ones you

keep taking with you no matter where you go. 

The puzzle comes with a little book of

cut-out with other possible homes that

can be made from the same puzzle pieces.

Each piece is patterned with a symbol both on 

the front and back.

Autumn with Omar Khayyam

In the summer of 2012, I met Diego Moreno, 
the publisher of NordicaLibros. We talked about extending his beautiful catalogue of illustrated classic literature to include classics from the East and the Orient. 
I wanted to begin with an illustrated version
 of Omar Khayyam's Rubayaat
and sent him the following two images as a trial.

Photo by Kenza Benamour

Photo by Kenza Benamour

Photo by Kenza Benamour

Last summer, we confirmed that the book 

would be included in the catalogue in 2015. 

And in my excitement, I did what I do whenever I begin any new project...I started a notebook.

In it I began to compile ideas, observations and image research

that inspire me. 

And I read lots. I used making the book and excuse for buying many many beautiful versions of the Rubayaat and read all of them.

I'm fascinated by the variations in the text...

how a single collection of quatrains can be compiled, read and translated into so many different forms.

I am equally fascinated by something in the text 

that I had never quite seen before...how in every single verse there are two line dedicated to life and two to death.

In fact the entire poem (whichever the version), dances through a cycle of life and death, entering a celebratory feast of enjoying the few passing moments we have on earth, using metaphors of nature, wine, love and both carnal and divine intoxication.

I started to play with the idea of making the entire book as one continuous image. I would like the first and last images to link so

that the entire image is a continuous circle.

Here is a little storyboard I began to work out my ideas.

   

And before signing off, a verse from the

translation of Arthur Talbot in 1908, to warm

up this first rainy autumn night. 

But bring me Wine; for words I do not care; 
I have thy lips, and all my Heav'n is there; 
Bring wine to match thy cheeks; my penitence 
Is full of tangles as thy clust'ring hair.

A Diwali to celebrate...

A few days ago was Diwali, the festival of lights. 

This year, my celebratory card was inspired by a project I am working on that was a result of a wonderful workshop at 

Gustavo Puerta's Escuela Peripatetica. 

The workshop La lectura del Ilustrador (The Illustrator's Reading) invited it's participants to read traditional tales 

and work at appropriating them by creating a personalized reading through images.

We read lots and lots...

Grimm, Anderson, Bashevis Singer,Perrault, among others.

After which each one of us chose a tale to work with.

I chose Rudyard Kipling's The Elephant Child: an endearing story about a small elephant whose insatiable curiosity leads him to

very unexpected travels and encounters.

We made lots of work too: 

from Ex-libris, to illustrated initials, 

and Chinese shadow puppets. My Chinese shadow puppets of the characters appear in my previous post.

Here are some images of my ex-libris and some sketches. 

And gradually began adapting our images to our own personal 

interpretations of the stories. 

In the last phase of the workshop each one of us was assigned a traditional story-telling object to create with our chosen story.

Mine was the portable storytelling shrine or temple from Northern India called the Kavaad.

Until a couple weeks ago, I had never seen an actual Kavaad, but then visiting Akhyan an exhibition of Indian Masks, I was thrilled to find two of them. And spent quite a lot of time sketching them, and figuring out the intricate system of doors and flaps and how I would eventually have to construct my own.

  

Kavaad from Akhyan exhibition in Madrid 

Zoom of the Kavaad's inner door revealing the sacred shrine

My notes & sketches of the Kavaad

Sketches of the visual structure of the story

 

I have yet to start building the actual object, 

but decided to begin a drawn structure a part of the kavaad as my

diwali greeting for this year.

The inner shrine reveals a fully grown Elephant's Child in the embodiment of a Ganesha-like god. 

artwork for the greeting

Wishing you all a very colorful and light-filled Diwali!

Will post updates on this project soon.

Diwali goody bags

Rangoli (colored decorations)

Diwali pooja (ritual)