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?

Drawing Natalie Portman from "Black Swan"

Watch 6 hours of drawing, shading and digital colouring effort compressed into a little under 4 minutes —

The Making of "Flight"

Since some of you have been asking, here are the base images that were used to make my recent "Flight" wallpaper —

And here's the step-wise process —

1. The three images were overlayed on each other.

2. Orientations of the images were matched to make it appear as if the birds were flying in the same direction.

3. Overlapping birds were cloned out.

4. The tones, brightness and contrast were adjusted.

5. Finally, text was added to produce the final image.

Lazy Sunday Special

Was bored this evening, so I boiled a ear of sweet corn in water, removed the kernels (how time-consuming that can be!) and added some Mango Thokhu pickle, salt, chilli powder and lime juice. For lack of any alternative seasoning (and to make the photo look good), curry leaves were added at the end. Trust me, it tastes as good as it looks.

In case you've noticed, the blog also has a new design now! The template uses Google Web Fonts, which doesn't always display correctly until the page is refreshed. No idea why.

Microwave Experiments

Hard to believe that a whole year of my MBA course is over! My 9-month stint at Wipro definitely felt a lot longer than this. I guess time flies when you're having fun, and when you're too busy with college work to watch the time go right out the window (as Mike would put it).

I will be in Hyderabad till tomorrow and then I'm off to Bangalore for a 2-month Summer Internship at Lenovo. What better place to spend the summer than the city with the best weather in India, and the city with the highest density of CVR population I know (no wonder I get a warm welcome every time I visit)! Ironically, it is the same city I said goodbye to not too long ago.

So what have I been upto the past two weeks here in Hyderabad? Well, mostly experimenting with the new microwave we bought at home. I tried my hand at baking a cake and some biscuits. Here are the results —

Experiment #1: Plain Cake

It looked perfect when I took it out of the microwave, it tasted just fine when I had a piece too. But as it cooled, it became real hard, and not exactly eatable — either the batter was too thick or I must have left in the microwave for too long. Whatever the case, the cake finally had to be thrown away.

Experiment #2: Shortbread

The second experiment didn't turn out as bad, thankfully. In fact, these biscuits came out amazingly well — crisp, buttery and yummy. If only I had a biscuit cutter, they would look as good as they taste!

Apart from baking stuff, I've been reading a book which I would have never imagined myself reading some months ago, and have started watching this intriguing series (with barely an opening sequence) about a bunch of people stranded on an island. I'd say I have enough to keep me occupied for quite a while, wouldn't you?