Zainab's Art Adventures

Different Same , by Zainab Salman For several years, I have always been double-minded about using ink for anything . I write solely with fineliners, and never fountain pens, and use ink only when I feel a sudden urge to experiment with calligraphy or something that can only be carried out with ink. This is largely because of all my unpleasant experiences with ink, most of which end up with a wonderful piece of work ruined with blotches of ink all over. I have never known a medium that can be messier than ink. However, for this piece, I felt like I wanted to use ink. And gladly, the results were much better than my expectations. :D For this painting I used a compass (for the circle patterns), a grey fineliner, green ink and a reed pen.  The name of the painting, Different Same , has a lot to do with the meaning behind it. If you look closely, there is a lot of repetition in the design - all the shapes, although each slightly different in design and size, are essential...

Hey there! I've been inactive for quite a long time, but I'm back now. :) This post contains sketches I've been making all this while, mostly pen. Those of you who have been following my blog probably know my preference for using pens over pencils for sketching. Something I love drawing: my hands and feet. I used to draw hands a lot but recently I realized that it had been a long time since I last did that. not bad, eh? I'm definitely NOT a natural. :p my sketchbooks are filled with lots of failed sketches like this one, lol. when you're bored during a workshop... I don't often get the opportunity to draw people; largely because no one sits still long enough to be sketched. However, sometimes I do doodle people during programs etc. when no one is looking. ;D  I drew these random people while waiting at an airport lounge with nothing else to do. I guess it isn't very ethical to stare at people while you're drawing them (o...

This is a painting I made digitally. This is one of the first good pieces of digital art I've made in a long time. Although I'm reasonably good at graphic designing and I'm not that bad at drawing traditionally either, I really do suck at digital art. Anyway, this is one of the not-so-bad ones, something I made fairly recently. I honestly don't have much to say about this. I'm sure this has some sort of 'meaning' behind it but I'm not sure what exactly. So I'm going to leave it to you to work out what it means, do let me know in the comments. xD Untitled digital painting

Long time, no post, I know . :/ I've been busy but I hope to be active on this blog once more. :) Here are some pen sketches which I made in Kashmir (on a trip to Sharda; Neelum Valley). I have been meaning to post these for more than a month but procrastination always gets in the way. :/ Kashmir was a wonderful place, definitely one of the most beautiful places I've been to. We got a chance to explore the place, and to absorb in the sights, sounds and smells of nature. These sketches (some reasonably refined, others quite unfinished) are an exploration of the natural beauty of the valley. Unfortunately (and contrary to the title of this post) I couldn't sketch any of the mountains. They just seemed too huge in their size, and too varied in their features and I really doubted I could capture the landscape with my pen and paper, although I do wish I had at least made an attempt to sketch them. But I did make sketches of other things. :) Here they are. This one was the ...

One of the things I   enjoy doing most is typography/ hand-lettering. It is something that I'm doing very often, and most of the time, I'm doing it instinctively. Luckily, I don't even need any fancy materials for it. Most of the time; I simply use these black pointers by a local company but once I also got a Staedtlar Triplus Fineliner  (and hey, these are not   affiliate links! ;D) and that lasted longer. Anyhow, here are some quotes I read somewhere and really liked, so I typograph-ed them. (I know typography is a noun but because I do it so much, I really think it should be a verb as well as a noun. :D). This quote by Cyril Connolly is one of my all-time favorites. It currently hangs in our study space, to remind us something very important. :) "Better to write for ourselves and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." -Cyril Connolly (click on this for a closer look) I made this one with brown and white acrylic paints on c...

I have seen artists who sketch or draw special, unusual stuff only, but then maybe sketching is something very special for them. For me though, sketching is something very habitual and everyday; kind of like an exercise I try to do regularly, just to keep myself in shape. Thus the subjects of my drawings are also everyday objects - you are unlikely to find in my sketchbook a sketch of a pretty vase of roses but you are very likely to find a drawing of a pile of books or a cluttered table. I also tend to sketch  with pens rather than pencils  because then I can't erase or keep on trying to make my lines straight; I simply   draw , without criticizing my own work. While I'm drawing with pens, I am not expecting perfect end-results; instead, I am simply enjoying the journey, and am more at peace with myself. So here are some more pen-sketches. Although I have mainly used black fineliner pens instead of coloured ones, I have used coloured highlighter markers (one of my a...

I have been playing around with typography for quite some time and through the years, I have learnt lots of things about it (most of them from experience). Here are some tips that might be useful to people new to typography, or want to improve at it. Most of these tips are more of principles rather than tips as they cover typography in general, not one aspect of it.  1. Play around with your words , and feel free to break all limitations and rules of shape, size, proportion and positioning. Remember, you are not practicing handwriting , so forget all the rules they taught you at school. Experiment -  Try stretching out some of your letters, or make some words larger than others to increase emphasis. Also,you don't have to obsess over upper and lowercases - I often use a mixture of both, because that way I have more choice to choose a letter that fits more into the typography style I am using. 2. Ensure that your text is read-able . Experiment as much as you want to, but...

Soon I was asked to make more flyers. Here was another chance to polish my design skills! My next task was making a flyer for a workshop for teachers titled 'Resolving issues of Misbehaviour'.  I accepted the offer gratefully, but I soon realized it wasn't going to be easy. Infact, it wasn't going to be easy at all. The title of the workshop wasn't going to make the search for an appropriate image easy(All of ERDC's Workshops' flyers have images, so I was supposed to make one with an image as well). The title was so generic, at first it seemed impossible to come up with an image. I surfed on Google images (I'm not much into illustration on the computer so the image had to come from Google, obviously)   for at least forty minutes before I found the image on the brown flyer.  Then I found another image, the one on the other flyer. I knew it was the perfect image. Then I adapted the brown flyer and changed the image. The orange-and-blue one was ac...

I am so sorry for not being able to post in October until yet! Anyways, here is a painting I made around late September; make-up on canvas once again. sorry for the bad quality :/  There was something wrong with our DSLR's memory cards so I had to take this picture with my mother's phone I made this one on a 10" by 10" inches canvas. Although I intended to make something entirely with lip-gloss initially, I did not have enough of it and the it was too dull  so I was compelled to use lipstick( I hate everything dull ). Later on I used some eye-shadow for the clouds and too make the buildings look shiny. I did not have any plan for this beforehand, nor did I make any initial sketches; I just pulled off the plastic covering from the canvas and got to work. I thought I would make something abstract but that didn't just happen. I made a few lipstick strokes and then decided that it was a building, then made more buildings. This is called ' Illusion' b...

This is a canvas painting I made using make-up. Although I have made several paintings with cosmetics before as well(you can find at least a few posts on my blog with the label Make-up Art ; but they are all very old) this was the first time I made one on a canvas. The canvas was a lovely size, 6" by 6"inches(the smallest our art store has). I used substandard-quality lip gloss(which someone gave me and my sister as a gift but I decided to use them for art instead because they were not very good-quality), and some of my mom's expired lipsticks, plus some old eyeliner and nail-polish that we barely use.   This is what I do with make-up.  XD haha Even though the results aren't satisfactory enough, I had a good time making this. I guess I hadn't drawn hands for a long time, even though they are something I love drawing.  It was fun. :D