The 'No Omega' Merchandise Arrives

Got a package from the Swedish band 'No Omega' today - it has a CD and a T-Shirt with the artwork I made for them! Thanks guys!

Speaking at Pecha Kucha Night Hyderabad Vol. 8

I was recently invited as a speaker at Pecha Kucha Night Hyderabad Vol. 8, held at Lamakaan on March 31, 2012.

Pecha Kucha Nights are informal events organised in over 500 cities across the world, where creative people get together and share their ideas, works, thoughts, holiday snaps - just about anything really. Presentations are made in the PechaKucha 20x20 format - 20 images x 20 seconds.

In my presentation, 'Know Tools, Create Better', I used examples of my drawings, photos, digital art, animated shorts and Doom levels to highlight the role of software tools in my creative process, and why I think every artist should learn them.

This was my first talk ever at a public forum, and it was a lot of fun! The official video of my presentation is now up on YouTube:


Hope you like it!

On a related note, my brother Karthik spoke at PKN Hyderabad Vol. 6. You can watch his presentation here: 'My Movie Fan Artwork'. And on an unrelated note, my Engineering college had its Decennial Day Celebrations on the same day as this event, 31-Mar-2012. Congratulations CVR!

A Trip to Srisailam

Had been to Srisailam last month, on the eve of Shivaratri (18-19 February). Here are some glimpses from the trip:

For my friends outside of India, here are some video notes:

• 0:23: Roadside Mirchi Bajji, a popular snack in Andhra Pradesh made out of chillies and gram/rice flour.
• 0:59: Lakhs of devotees come to this small town for Shivaratri (we were there on the eve of Shivaratri). There aren't enough hotels to accomodate them all, so they just sleep on the roads with their bags.
• 1:22: Devotees dressed in traditional brown/orange attire.
• 1:29: People who worship Lord Shiva usually have 3 horizontal stripes of vibhuti (ash) on their forehead, like the old woman here. Worshipers of Lord Vishnu wear 3 vertical stripes.
• 1:50: People trying to balance coins on their sides. It is believed that if the coins stand erect without falling, your wish will be granted.
• 2:14: There was something (not sure what) far away that people were trying to see from this spot. It is believed that people who are able to see it attain Moksha.
• 2:42: At the right-most corner, a part of the Srisailam dam is visible.
• 3:15: Local buses! Traveling in one of these in India is an experience in itself.

Our budget for this 'really local' trip was Rs. 1000/- per person, inclusive of travel, food, stay and sight-seeing for 2 days.

Oh and the background track in the video is Bent - Invisible Pedestrian. Heard it a long time ago in one of the CSI: Miami episodes; I think it fits quite nicely here.

Photos Exhibited at Darpan 2012

Infosys Hyderabad organised a photography exhibition, Darpan 2012, on March 6 and 7 at the Gachibowli campus. Entries were invited from all the 20,000+ employees based out of Hyderabad and the best 100 entries were selected for display.

The work of 30 photographers made the final cut, and I'm happy to announce that I was one of them! My selected entries are listed below:

1. City by the Lake
2. Jog Falls
3. Steps
4. War Times

The photos were also put up for sale, and the proceeds were donated to charity. Twenty two prints (12"x18") of mine were sold over the two days, including six framed prints and sixteen non-framed ones. The large format prints looked so beautiful that I couldn't help ordering 2 framed prints for myself too. Can't wait for them to arrive!

Designing Album Art for Swedish band 'No Omega'

Swedish rock/hardcore band 'No Omega' stumbled across my site and artwork last month, and asked me if I could design the cover for their debut full-length record 'Metropolis'. I said yes.

I had initially sent across some samples to help them decide the cover's basic look and feel, and the typography that they wanted to use. A couple of mails went back and forth, some tweaks were made here and there, and this is the final outcome —

What do you think? The tracklist and credits will be added to the back cover once the content is finalised.

Making Brownies

Tried my hand at making brownies for the first time yesterday, with surprisingly awesome results! Beats the cakes and biscuits I've baked before hands down. Here are images of me at work —

What I learnt in the process —

1. Preheating the microwave using Convection mode. The manual could use some better writing!
2. You can't melt chocolate in a microwave. They come out nicely burnt.

Below is the final result —

In the picture on the right, I put a few chopped walnuts on the brownie pieces and topped it with honey. Mouth wateringly delicious is what it was!

If you want to try making these yourself, here's the recipe I used —

Ingredients:

• 60gms chocolate (I used a Cadbury's Dairy Milk bar)
• 1/3 cup butter (unsalted is ideal, but I used the regular Amul butter)
• 2/3 cup powdered sugar (use 1 cup if you're using unsweetened chocolate)
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence
• 3/4 cup flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/3 cup chopped walnuts (you can put more if you like!)

Method:

Cream together butter, sugar and vanilla essence. Beat in egg and add melted chocolate. Blend. Mix in flour and chopped walnuts. Pour into a greased pan and bake in a microwave preheated to 180° C for 20 minutes. That's pretty much it!

RSS Feed Improvements

Got back to some PHP coding today (after more than two years!) and made some improvements to the RSS feed of VarunAbhiram.com. You'll notice that the titles are much neater now, and the feed items now feature thumbnail images! All I had to do was to hook up the RSS code to my nifty PHP script that automatically picks up images from their respective locations, scales them down and feeds them to the browser.

Small change, but makes the feed look a lot richer, wouldn't you say?