I didn’t paint the town red, or use the vibrant palettes of blues, greens and reds and celebrate a jubilatory occasion of colours, or create a life sized portrait of a washed up singer selling his record labels in infamous sex stores. The theme for the last couple of days, which by the way had been filled with an overwhelming dose of expressiveness and articulation, were ambigrams.
Yes, don’t get astonished if you haven’t heard of this term before. There’s a reason why the word ambigram is zigzagged with a red underline when you type it on your MS Word software.
Ambigram, technically, is any word, that spells exactly the same if you turn the page upside down and give it a read. So, when I say that I actually crafted an ambigram out of my own name, being Shaurya, it certainly requires a lethally artistic mental organisation. Because clearly, if you write Shaurya down on a piece of paper, turn the paper and give it a read, it, for sure, will not read the same. It won’t even read english, will it?
So yeah, that’s how the challenge of drawing an ambigram from my name came about. To break the ambigram into individual alphabets, this meant that the letter S should’ve been designed in a way that reads A upside down. And the same goes for H, which should’ve read Y, A which should’ve read R.
U, positioned right in the centre of the name had to be catered meticulously, of course. Considering there needs to be a design that would make the seemingly impossible possible and stand out to make U seem like U when turned upside down.
But well, through straight lines and curves, spinning sketches that interlaced through the arcs and other lines, I managed to come up with the first version of the ambigram. It looked relatively modern and something that a an amateur program built by a second year software engineering student could’ve made on his personal computer, without any calligraphic touches or significant hints or abstract artistry involved.
The next day, as amazed as I already was at my own skill of crafting this unique blend of architecture and art, me and my friend got down to modify of the previous piece of work. From being a mere skeleton of lines and curves, we flocked from the highly modern and mechanical way of creating ambigrams to a relative ancient and calligraphic type. This is where my friend, ironically the only friend I’ve had around who participated in my type of art, exuded her craft.
We played around with the alphabets a bit, altering and modifying the things that seemed way too obvious to the naked eye. So we altered the H, which was initially in its uncapped form, and replaced it’s the standing line that followed a curve at the top to make it the base of the uncapped Y when you turn it around, with a capped H with the left arm extended to be the very same arc that provided the base of an uncapped Y. The rest remained the same more or less.
What was amazingly astounding about the entire adventure was how endurably, we sat through 3 (could’ve been 4) hours, sketching and resketching, modelling and remodelling, deciding on the colour schemes, putting angelic and demonic representative markers on top of our names (with the inspiration coming from Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, which I labelled as BOSS), discussing how we would’ve aced had we worked this hard towards our respective professional fields, and then celebrating in that moment of glory after we crossed the threshold of giving it that final design.
Choosing the colours was another arduous task. Since the theme was angels and demons, and there were two names, it didn’t take much before my friend came out with the idea of referring to our names as angels and demons – and since the idea sprout from her side, she was the angel and I had to be demon. To be honest, being a demon doesn’t demean my integrity, considering I got to have my name coloured in black and red. You have to be an artist to fully understand the awesomeness of black’s union with red.
And hers angel wings were, after going from dark green and light green (which was the original combination in the designing phase), purples, pinks and magentas, were narrowed down to dark purple and pink, and light purple and magenta. Since, to me, purple has always exuberated something that deserves a stronger hold as opposed to any colour except black, we gave her the dark purple wings.
All this, was with Linkin Park (Reanimation) running in the background. The music is experimental in its own terms without a doubt, thus, inspiring, at least me to spin innovation through my creative wand.
The best part, after the entire intricate designing and giving it a colourful lustre, was the calligraphic touch my friend gave to the entire scene. I don’t know where she learnt that from, but I am going to hone myself in that art. The pair of ambigrams, all of a sudden, seemed like an extraction from a mid-medieval stone, where a group of native Indians might have scripted down the symbolic ancient numeric system.
The result isn’t obvious to the naked eye (therefore, the other name, if you cant make out, is Vedika), and if you aren’t a Dan Brown fan, there is a fat chance you may not want to bother over the incredibility that it displays, but to the ones that do understand art, here’s what we finally came up with…
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