LITERARY IMPULSE-FOCUS ON ILLUSTRATORS
All About Illustrations
Know-the-illustrator
Note from LI Editors: Lubna has been associated with us, for a long time. She has meticulously designed our logo and kindly did the covers for a lot of our issues, and as you must have seen, each of her artwork is exquisite and just blows your mind. We decided to know a bit more about her, the fine illustrator. We are sure you’ll love this little interview of sorts, and get to know about her mind space.
Thank you, Lubna, for taking up our questions and answering them ever so beautifully and with such detail. We are sure, this’ll be helpful for a lot of people. Looking forward to many more collaborations and we’re so humbled and thankful that you take your time out for our magazine.
One line about you, who you are, and likewise.
I am a lawyer, author, filmmaker, and a multidisciplinary artist. I grew up in Kolkata and am currently based in Mumbai, India.
When and how did you start illustrating, any childhood memories, etc.
My earliest memory of a doodle goes to the first standard, Camlin Art Contest, where the topic was a garden and I had drawn several round flower pots growing from flower pots and instead of making the page margins with a ruler, I had drawn petals, roses, and leaves as margins. The art teacher was so stunned by my submission that my drawing was specially put up on the school notice board! I still remember it vividly, the illustration was done with colour pencils, and had very sharp details and in the PTA, my parents were told I was gifted! Though it was brushed aside for several years I recently reconnected with art to express my writings. I used to doodle behind notebooks and diaries through the years, but my first serious illustration as a grown-up was 6 years back when I was working on a film set.
Your inspirations/forms/favourite illustrators.
My one real inspiration is the feeling I get when I see a box of colours or when I read a good book.
I love picture books and while growing up, my favourites were the Pop-up storybooks, that have 3D pages that appear when you turn the pages. I still find them very fascinating and they absolutely cheer me up. I also have many pop-up maps that I have collected from places that I have travelled. I don’t have any particular favourite forms, though I love the combination of nature with surrealism in art.
Since this is such an interesting question I want to share something with readers, which opened my world to new experiments in illustrations.
I am greatly influenced by the works of Lewis Carroll, Pablo Picasso, J. R. R. Tolkien and Satyajit Ray.
- Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, pen name Lewis Carroll (1832–98), is popularly known as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), but not many know that he was also the first illustrator of the tale. For the original version of Alice, titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (1864), Carroll designed illustrations that follow the nineteenth-century British caricature tradition. This style, popular in the 1830s and 1840s, uses exaggeration and theatrical techniques to dramatic and comic effect.
Alice’s Adventures Under Ground was a Christmas gift that Dodgson, a Mathematical Lecturer at Christ Church in Oxford, wrote and illustrated for his favorite childhood friend, Alice Liddell. Alice begged Carroll, after a boat trip, to write down the story for her. The result was Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, an 18,000-word handwritten text with 37 illustrations by the author. It now stands as a timeless classic etched in history and when I visited Alice’s Sweet shop in Oxford, it was a priceless moment for me. I bought the mini jam bottle with ‘eat me’ written on them, and a part of my childhood came flashing back at me- I used to pretend to be Alice shrinking under the table and I would disappear under the bed sometimes too. Then I would eat a make-belief candy and pretend to re-grow into my original size only to grow into a bigger Alice. I used to enact this as I had seen the illustrations in the book and they had hugely impacted me.
2. Born in Spain to a professional artist, Pablo Ruiz Picasso is now famous as a painter and sculptor, but he also left a lesser-known body of work as an illustrator, graphic designer, and a political activist.
A prolific sculptor, Picasso created an estimated 4,000 sculptures and ceramics during his career. His cubist style and surrealist movement in fact began with intensely geometrical illustrations. His usage of line strokes, symmetry, imagery, and bold colours always give me a visual space to wonder in between lines and to experiment with new things on paper.
3. J. R. R. Tolkien’s artwork was a key element of his creativity from the time when he began to write fiction.
The philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien prepared illustrations for his Middle earth fantasy books, facsimile artifacts, more or less “picturesque” maps, calligraphy, and sketches and paintings from life. Some of his artworks combined several of these elements to support his fiction. In his lifetime, some of his artworks were included in his novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings while others were used on the covers of different editions of these books.
I spent a summer studying creative writing at Exeter College and one sleepy afternoon when I was lying on the grass in the inner gardens, I realized that Tolkien too sat in this very garden, and then I found his book, Tolkien at Exeter College, which is an account of Tolkien’s undergraduate life at Oxford. It has several anecdotes and interesting facts that you must read if you can. That is the garden where I made the preliminary illustrations of my book, Purpose of Flowers.
4. Satyajit Ray is widely considered as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time but it is not known to many that Ray started as a graphic illustrator before his emergence as a Bengali film icon.
He was an Indian film director, scriptwriter, documentary filmmaker, author, essayist, lyricist, magazine editor, illustrator, calligrapher, and music composer. Ray illustrated all his books and designed covers for them, as well as created all publicity material for his films including most of his film posters. He also designed covers of several books by other authors, like Jim Corbett’s Man-Eaters of Kumaon(translated version) and Jawahar Lal Nehru’s Discovery of India.
Ray designed four typefaces for the roman script named Ray Roman, Ray Bizarre, Daphnis, and Holiday script, apart from numerous Bengali ones.
He was a true master of the visual arts and while growing up in Calcutta, I was blessed to experience his influence around us.
His works, both as illustrations and cinema, have greatly influenced my perceptions and sensibilities to grow as a multi-disciplinary artist and to express and build my art in different mediums like films, posters, designs, line arts, and everything that I can explore further.
Why do you love illustrating? Which part of your home do you do the illustrations in?
Illustrations are my friends. And we have a lot of fun together. Sometimes illustrations can express what words cannot and I thoroughly enjoy creating little worlds on paper. I like to sit by the window in the gentle sea breeze, with my little flower pots and it is my favourite corner to create and sometimes to simply stare into nothingness.
Your take on digital illustrations vs traditional illustrations.
I love them both.
Digital medium is great — compact and freely accessible at any random hour in the middle of nowhere, I have made illustrations in pouring rainstorms and in traffic jams, on mountaintops, by the sea, and sometimes when I am half asleep and I wake up from a dream I don’t remember.
However, I prefer traditional artwork, made with real colours, by hand on paper or canvas. For me, no tablet or gadget can replace the connection I feel when I am working with a pastel stick or with paints. I like to touch the colours and feel their texture, something which is not possible in digital artwork.
Suggestions/Tips to someone who’d like to start as an illustrator.
You should start immediately. Anywhere is a good start, because only then you will find out more about yourself, your style, and strengths. Carefully observe the shapes and colours around your immediate surroundings and find out what you are drawn towards. Create small pieces first and practice with new themes. Often the difference between good and brilliant is in the details, so work on that.
Fact Sources:
https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/carroll/golden.html
https://trydesignlab.com/blog/pablo-picasso-you-dont-know-illustration-design/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien%27s_artwork
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyajit_Ray
https://www.thedailystar.net/star-weekend/art/the-illustrious-life-satyajit-ray-1571014
http://www.johngarth.co.uk/php/tolkien_at_exeter_college.php
A huge thank you and applause for the Shabd Aaweg Literary Impulse Editorial Team for their innovative efforts and for coming up with such interesting content.
Cheers,
Lubna
