I love making posters (Big Surprise). It just feels good to have people respond and turn up, even though you know it's mostly because of the event and not because of the poster - but you feel like a superhero, nevertheless.
The following one was for a one-week Advanced Graphic Design workshop by Rajesh Dahiya. He told us to pick any one of the six songs he gave us (which included a Mozart piece & a Bhajan), and make a poster for it. I chose Electric Piya.
But of course, it wasn't meant to be so easy. There were six thigs we needed to think about:
- One word for the song.
- The apt type for the one word
- One Tagline.
- A 100-word Write-up
- An object that represented the song
- The mood-board
All of this was stiched together to make the final poster which communicates with the viewer at different levels - from a distance of 7 metres to 7 inches.
Since the final word I chose was 'Patakha', the type needed to be loud, explosive and crass. I imagined a Rocket exploding.
This was the one word, one-liner and write-up respectively for what I made of Electric piya.
Khokhla-Patakha
A lot of growling, a little bite.
A gun in his hand, a champa behind his ear, and his head in the clouds. Stormy, spluttering clouds that you never know when they might burst. Electric piya paints this picture of a flashy, bratty, bijli personality – who, at the same time, is pretty messed up in the head. The singer mocks him, but it’s not a sneering lampoonery – it is still good-natured, and it’s not an evil laugh that you’ll hear in the background - more like a gaggle of girls giggling. This flamboyant guy is all bling on the surface, he lords over his women and considers himself jan-nayak – but he doesn’t realise he is riding donkeys instead of horses. The jazzy, fuschia-colored wallpaper is just, to some extent, a farce, and you can easily see the dark, rusty bark grumbling through the cracks.
The following artwork was for a theatre event called Dramatismo, which was being organized in my friend's college.
I used this artwork in the following poster I was supposed to make for the event.
I made another one, long after the event was over - just for the heck of it.
We had a Theatre course last year with the vivacious Arsheya Sattar - one of my favourite courses till date. We performed a full-fledged play at the end - The Post-Office, written by Rabindranath Tagore. It was about a boy who could never step out of his house owing to his illness, and kept looking out of the window, yearning to go outside.
We took photographs of our batchmates with their faces pressed against window-panes, looking out eagerly. Then we took life-sized prints, cut them out and stuck them on glass panes around the campus, flanked by the one line which he keeps repeating throughout the story - so it seemed, for a split second, that there were actually people looking out of the window.
