Bishnupur - Town of Terracotta

A small town which i m sure many of you havent heard about this, its just 97 kilometres from kharagpur.  Best way to reach bishnupur is Rupasi Bangla Express which departs around 0600 hours at Kolkata and reach around 1000 hours.  I heard a lot about this town about the famous Baluchuri saree about those terracota temple. Trip to bishnupur came out to be a complete bundle of surprise.  Main attraction of Bishnupur is Terracotta temples, all these temples are dedicated to lord Krishna and Radha.  one s is not enough to describe the pluralness of this town it should be templessssssssssss.....many terracotta temples are spread across the town peeping out of every corner of town.  Many temples were like place of ADDA for the adults.

(Thanks to the ticket examiner Bamdev Dutta Da at ShaymRai Temple, he told us everything he know about this town) 
Bishnupur was the capital of Malla kings of Mallabhum, or the warrior kings, which was an important dynasty that ruled Bengal for a long time with its beginnings in late 7th century that lasted till early 19th century.  This is more than 1100 years and 55 generations. Most temples belong to the 17-18th century. It is said that the dynasty was originally a Shaivik i.e. they used to follow the lord Shiva but king Bir Hambir who ruled in 16th century converted to Vaishnava (who follow Lord Vishnu) and that lead to construction of all these temples dedicated to incarnations of Vishnu and most prominently Krishna.

These temples are not carved out of stones or something, these were constructed from the clay that is locally available.  All these temples are made of bricks and were decorated with terracotta work tiles.  From Bishnupur station you can hire a cab or a cycle rickshaw to visit all the temples of bishnupur.  It would be better to hire a cab you can save lot of time.  The cab will cost you around 400 to 500 rupees.  It depends on the cab driver which direction he is going to show you the town.

We started from Rasmancha which is towards east, one has to buy tickets there for entrance to Rasmancha, Jorbangla and Shyamrai temple. Rasmancha is a unique structure combination of 3 architecture in a single building.  Pyramid roof, then typical indian Bengal Roof structure - do chal char chal roof and the corridor architecture is very much mughal style.  Main purpose of this Rasmancha was for housing idols of Krishna from all other temples during the Rash Utsav.

Ras Mancha Temple

 Madan Mohan temple, built by Malla King Durjan Singha in the AD 1694

Madan Mohan Temple

Shaym Rai Temple, built by Raghunath singha in 1643 AD.  Five shikhara temple.  The terracotta art on the body of the temple expresses the activity of God Krishna and the Rash Utsav.  Even the architecture of Dakshineswar kali mandir is also inspired from this temple only.

Shyam Rai Temple

Rash Utsav expressed on the wall of Shyam Rai temple

Radha Laljiu temple, built by Bir Singha 1658 AD, is one of the best examples in laterite of this type with a single sikhara on a curved bangla chala roof.

Radha Laljiu Temple, Image courtesy Jaydharclix

Main Gateway of Bishnupur also known as Pathar Darwaja is built by dressed laterite blocks.  This was the northern entrance to the royal residence, and was built by Maharaja Bir Singha.  There are narrow slits for the archer and gunman.

Main Gateway of Bishnupur, Photography Venkat Sridhar

 Radha Shayam temple, built by chaitanya singh in 1758 AD

Radha Shyam Temple, Photography Venkat Sridhar

 Jor Bangla Temple, built by Raghunath singha in 1655 AD,  also known as Krishna Rai Temple.

Jor Bangla Temple, Photography Venkat Sridhar

Just opposite to Radha shyam temple, there is a temple one should say oldest temple in Bishnupur.  People say that Maharaja Jagat Malla established this temple and the image of the goddesss Mrinmoyee in 997 AD after getting diving command from the Goddess.  The statue of the goddess is made up of Ganga Mati (mud from ganga river)  One can see abandoned royal residence adjacent to the temple.  And all these Radha Laljiu, Jorbangla, gateway are in the same cluster.
      There is another temple Chinnamasta temple of goddess kali.  Chinnamasta means beheaded, the statue of goddess is beheaded. photography is prohibited at both the mrinmoyee and chinnamasta temple.  Near the Chinnamasta temple you can see Dalmadal cannon was used by Malla King Gopal Singh to defend himself against the Maratha commander Bhaskar Rao in 1742 AD.  But people say that the Lord Krishna himself came as a boy of 18 years  and used this cannon to protect Malla Dynasty.

Dal Madal Cannon, Photography Venkat Sridhar

Terracotta handicrafts for sale, Image courtesy Jaydharclix

Terracotta handicrafts for sale, Image courtesy Jaydharclix

 There are few other places like LalBandh, LalGarh,  GumGarh which you can visit.  It will take 3 to 4 hours to visit all the places.  You can buy terracotta handicraft items near Madan Mohan temple and chinna masta temple.  The handicrafts are sold at fixed price but very reasonable.  One more thing for which Bishnupur is famous is Baluchuri saree.  If you travel in town you can find many shops and showrooms of Baluchuri sarees. While coming back i saw few on LalBandh road.

The terracotta temples have made Bishnupur a remarkable place in the history of Bengal as well as of India.


 Image Courtesy By Venkat Sridhar

Ahhhh its been long time...

I was searching for some papers on my beautifully chaosed bed, right then i saw my brushes and color palettes below my bed.  i asked myself and after a while i realized that i wasn’t after painting anything from long time, i was abusing my brushes, i had a very straight answer.......han be barso beet gye unko hath lgaye (yes u a** **** its been long time u have touched them). After a little more thought i decided to paint something.  I took out my album and ended with a image of a lady whom i clicked long back in 2005 in GOA, she was selling flowers and coconut near Shanta Durga temple. I am not a trained or professional  painter to use fabric colors or oil paints.  From school days I have been using water colors only.

 

And this was something I ended up with!!

Logo ideas for NGO's

There are many factors we have to consider while designing a logo. The company's target audience is high on the list. There are many features of a logo design like abstraction, font type, colors and illustration. Abstract logo designs are good and always been my favourite, a designer can always show their creativity through abstract logos only, but highly abstract logos are not suitable for business. Viewers may not associate your company with your services if the logo is too abstract. Simple, abstract logos are attractive and they promote your business' attributes and style.

An abstract logo has to be simple, yet complicated. Simplicity of an abstract logo design makes a logo easy to reproduce and its complicated aspect makes it easy for customers to recognize. Use limited colors in your NGO logos, avoid muddy colors and consider contrasts when thinking of designing a logo. 

    Generally all companies have same problems, they have to consider how they are perceived by their clients, their customers and their competitors.  But this is not at all a problem for NGO's they just want the logo to represent their thinking and cause. Sometimes client can ask you to show a complete scenario of their NGO in a single image, here comes the challenge.  Use blue, green, yellow colors for the logos as these colors represents care and help.  If the NGO is some kind of revolutionary organization then you can try orange, red and black.  But the final decision of the colors is going to be decided by the client only.  These theoretical color combinations for different logos are useless without approval of client.  So its client who is going to decide color of your logos.

Last month i got an oppurtunity to design logos for an NGO, actually two NGO's.   Following are the ideas I
came up with. Planting trees and education of underprivileged students is the motive of that NGO.

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How to scale contents of a file when you resize the stage in flash cs5.5?

With loads of devices coming into the market with different display sizes,  it becomes important for  designers to keep their designs flexible and compatible with all screen sizes.  Its ok with the css using percentage you can make your websites
flexible and compatible for all screen sizes but what about the flash files.  You need different .swf sizes for different screen sizes.  So you need to resize the .fla file and save it in different sizes as per your requirement.   Scaling the complete document of flash file with the stage is the only solution. 
Following are the steps to scale contents of a file when you resize the stage in flash cs5.5

Open the document which you want to resize

Go to Edit -- Preferences (Ctrl + U)

Preferences window will open
Check the options Align top left and Include locked and hidden layers under Scale Content, the options are at last in that preferences window

Then go to the properties window click on the spanner icon in the properties window near the size,  document settings window will open.

Enter the dimensions width and height and don't forget to check the option "Scale content with stage" then click on OK and your done.

Your file is resized.

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Multiple backgrounds with CSS

Using images in the background is always a better option to make your website look attractive.  Now most of the web browsers are supporting multiple backgrounds. Now we can have multiple background images to a DIV or any box elements.  Suppose there is a div with id divId

#divId{
width: 500px;
height: 250px;
background-image: url(girl.png), url(boardskygrass.png);
background-position: center bottom, left top;
background-repeat: no-repeat;
}


In the above example

two images are used sheep.png and boardskygrass.png

A comma-separated list of values for the background-image property, with each value generating a separate ‘background layer’.  The comma separated lists from the individual background images are then matched up, starting with the first value in each list.
     In the same way we can also use a comma separated list for the other background properties; like background-repeat, background-attachment, background-position, background-clip, background-origin and background-size.

If excess values are provided for any of the above properties they are ignored. e.g. if four values are supplied for the background-repeat property, but only three values are supplied for the background-image property, the fourth value in the list would not be used.
In the same way if not enough values are supplied for any of the individual properties, the list of values for that particular property are repeated, from the first value, as many times as required. For example; if only two values are supplied for the background-position property, but three values are supplied for the background-image property, the list of values for background-position would be repeated, thus the third background image specified would have the same background-position value as the first, as the first value is considered for all the background images.


Browser Compatibility

Browser support for multiple backgrounds is relatively widespread with all of the main browsers offering support, without the need for vendor prefixes.

Firefox has supported multiple backgrounds since version 3.6 (Gecko 1.9.2), Safari since version 1.3, Chrome since version 10, Opera since version 10.50 (Presto 2.5) and Internet Explorer since version 9.0.  So, there is no need to worry about the compatibility.  But you cant help if anybody is still using IE6*.

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How to create crayon effects drawing in photoshop?

Photoshop is always a better option for making graphics and effects. Here are the steps to get crayon effects in Photoshop

1.  Create a new blank document of the required size, e.g. 1000 px X 1000 px


2.  Select the Brush tool from the toolbar and in the tool options at the top of the screen, find the spatter brush, size 24 pixels in the drop down menu.
   If you want a thinner crayon you can pick a smaller diameter brush.

3.Open Brushes palette by choosing Window > Brushes.

 Brushes window will appear on your screen, click on “Brush Tip Shape” under Brush Presets thats is on the left hand side of the brushes window.
Make sure the value of spacing is 25% which is a slider at right bottom, you can see the preview area and confirm yourself.

4. Now click on “Shape Dynamics” option and set the Size Jitter to 20%, Angle Jitter to 100%, Roundness Jitter to  50% and Minimum Roundness to 25%.

5. Now click on “Color Dynamics” and set the Saturation Jitter to 50% and Brightness Jitter to 15%.

Now you have a crayon effect brush in your hands. It is as good as real crayon. You can vary the size of the brush by clicking on the Brush Tip Shape and changing the diameter there.

You can also save this brush by clicking on the Create New Brush Button at the bottom of the Brushes palette.

Following image is made by using the crayon brush effect,  you can use different colors and come up with much better kind of stuff than this.

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Tourism Logos

Thanks to Facebook and Blogspot that I got this opportunity of making a logo for Jhargram Tourism.  As always I am sharing my experience of making a tourism logo.  Every business got their own style their own requirements and they want their logo to represent the same. Making a logo for a tourism or travel agency is bit different from other business.  A tourism logo needs to be associated with the place to which it belongs.  But it also needs to embody the sense of rest and relaxation that many people seek when they voyage away from home.  
       But this is what we designers think when we start making a logo, ultimately you have to make something that client wants. Color, typeface, and images all come into play when designing the right logo for a tourism-oriented business.  You must  narrow the options and focus attention on the most appropriate combination of elements.  If you google for tourism logos you will find that in most of the logos either they have used their native animals or trees etc etc.  but one thing which is common in all the logos is that they use nice beautiful colors, most of them are multicolored.   The same thing I tried for this client also.   I tried multi colors and as usual some Text Twists thats it.  For making a tourism logo you must try different colors,  try something which is famous with that place and the very special T E X T  T W I S T S it always works believe me. It always works. I tried two text twists and in one I tried to portray a peacock as a phoenix bird.  But client finalised the one which represents their Jungle Mahal.  "Sal Trees" client decided to use it as their icon.
I gave him four proposed designs, and he finalised the following one:

The other three were:

I hope you like this.


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