kali-kali-zulfein

[kali-kali-zulfein]

i am suffering romantically

How foolish of me to be an old school lover in this hookup generation.

[kali-kali-zulfein]

[kali-kali-zulfein]

Tumse kitni mohabbat hai ye mai bta nhi skta,

Apni zindagi mei tumhari ahemiyat jata nhi skta

[kali-kali-zulfein]

dil aakhir tu kyun rota hai?

"साथ मे तो आज भी नही है तू

फिर भी दिल तुझे खोने से डरता है

पास रहे के भी साथ नही

फिर भी दिल यूं बिलखता है।"

मुस्कुराते हुए मैने कहा,

"साथ अब भी खड़ा हूं तेरे,

पास में तो अब भी हूं तेरे।

शिखवा क्या है इस दिल को,

जो आज भी खफा रहता है मुझसे।

तेरे नज़दीक रहने को जी करता है,

तेरे शिकायते सुनने का जी करता है।

होश खो बैठा हूं यहां मैं,

जो तुझे मुझसे बिछड़ने से डर लगता है।"

🍁🍂

[kali-kali-zulfein]

the desi urge to say "arey yaar" at the slightest inconvenience

[kali-kali-zulfein]

My earbuds were in, but I wasn't playing music. I needed to hear the world but didn't want the world to know I was listening.

Laurie Halse Anderson, The Impossible Knife of Memory

[kali-kali-zulfein]

oof. ouch. oh no.

I think most of our birthday anxiety comes from the fact that we're scared to find out if people love us as much as we love them

[kali-kali-zulfein]

i don't need alcohol to send texts i regret

[kali-kali-zulfein]

sometimes I sense an art-block around the corner so I try to make multiple compositions on a single page in an effort to let the creativity flow through me. I don't really have a lot of experience with human figures. okay maybe not experience but practice. i did a lot of human figures before I could learn the proportions and I just didn't practice them a lot and moved to faces and a little bit of still life. i even dabbled in love drawings but I don't think they're good enough to be shown here. not yet.

i did some of these during the cricket World Cup I think that's pretty evident. still not over India losing it to australia by the way. but as far as live drawing human figures are concerned, I think this is fair work.

I particularly like this because I took it as a challenge to make faces with minimum strokes and still showcasing the basic features, and the highlights and shadows.

[kali-kali-zulfein]

some faces and other things I made some time back. you'll notice that in a lot of my works there's often a little 'no' or 'wtf' to be seen and I don't really know what to make of it other than that i didn't really vibe with it when I was making it.

I really like the last composition with the ship and the flowers particularly because I didn't mean for it to be one single composition. i made a ship and then I made some flowers below it. although in retrospect it seems like the flowers are in the foreground of a grand ship quietly drifting towards the shore. neat.

[kali-kali-zulfein]

quarter to eleven, a winsome wednesday.

i had a dream.

about two days ago I woke up in the morning after having experienced a very pleasant but surely short lived dream in which I was making out with a person who hasn't been the subject of my dream in so long i thought that chapter was clearly over and complete. apparently not.

it has been so long since I've had a dream, I'm sure if it, yet i'm uncertain what the reason for it is. perhaps my head was already so filled with a great deal of thoughts to have been relaxed enough to dream. atleast that's what one of my dear friends thinks. after having been sure of what i dreamt I made sure to talk to my friend about it for partly two reasons. I wanted to share this with someone because i didn't want to keep it inside me too long. I wanted to externalise it to not let it grow into unkept fantasies in my head.

coming to the subject of the dream itself, it was an experience of the scene in both first and third person. i was sometimes myself and experiencing the actions myself, but also sometimes an audience of sorts, onlooking the scene. we, she and i, were roaming and strutting about what looked like a college campus, and we seemed to have paid particular attention to the classrooms. we were going in and out of labs and staff rooms and random classrooms until we found ourselves in one which seemed nothing out of the ordinary classroom. there was nothing in it that could set it apart from the rest of the classrooms. we go back towards the tables at the very end of the room, away from the door. and mind you, we didn't just walk. we practically skipped. we were so full of joy and mischief, we were happy. looking at us anyone would've been able to tell we'd been snuggly and all in love. so we're in each other's necks, we can't get away from each other and we sit on the desk at the very end. by sit i mean i am practically lying down making out with her. i occasionally so come up gasping for air and as and when I do that I slide my hands on her back in a very suggestive manner. she's sitting on my lap if that wasn't clear. we were going at it like little birds completely infatuated with the other. it was heavenly. I kept kissing her beautiful beautiful lips, not just a peck but wholeheartedly embracing her into my own self. i would on occasion break away from her kiss and move to her neck instead, planting little bites all over. I'd then come back up to her face and start pecking all over her cheeks and eventually find my way back to her lips. she was so beautiful. even though i know for a fact who I saw in my dream, it is much too difficult to remember her face as it looked in said dream. but there she was, ever so beautiful. joyful. and happy to be there with me. i wanted that feeling to never go away. but I woke up.

I woke up to remember it as vividly as I've written above. I immediately told my friend so as to never forget this invaluable dream. we talked about this and I told her how i missed this person from the depths of my heart. even if our relationship consisted of nothing but text messages to each other it was something very dear to me. and I miss that. i miss her.

and so after not a lot of convincing i texted her. Her. i said that i had missed her so deeply, that I had read somewhere to live life confidently and without regret, that i wanted us to be talking again and how much I missed that. i did.

she texted back. not exactly as i had hoped she would but come on I should just be happy that she texted back. she told me about her life, very little i must say, but she was never really that much of a sharer before. she told me she went on a trip recently that she enjoyed quite a lot, with her boyfriend.

ouch. I don't know why that hurt. it shouldn't have. as far as I'm concerned I was completely over my previous infantile infatuation with her. but seeing as how she is obviously moving forward in life and I'm very happy for her, truly. but in that moment i looked at myself and couldn't help but wonder if I had in anyway moved forward since I last spoke to her. i still have not reached an answer to that question to be quite honest. but I miss her.

i miss her and I thought of how I wanted to be with her in the past. why should anything stop me moving forward now? i will change, I will grow and if this is a part of it then so be it. whenever she comes back to our city I'll ask her out on a nice date and we'll catch up. hopefully.

[kali-kali-zulfein]

I started yet another sketchbook a week ago and here are some of the works from that. it's not a lot but i like the ones here.

[kali-kali-zulfein]

some more works from the charcoal sketchbook. these took time. one of these i did while on a road-trip and it took about twenty minutes and three kinds of pencils to make that. I'm quite proud of that one because I did that after a major art block and in the middle of my semester when I had a lot of work to do and a lot on my mind. in the back of that car, when my laptop was out of battery, i made that portrait of a woman from a reference image. that made me realise that sometimes I get way overconfident about my skill as an artist and take them for granted. i had this phase of thinking that that skill has left me as I was not practicing a lot. but when I saw myself make that portrait, I felt at ease and in control. it made me very happy. that was a good october.

[kali-kali-zulfein]

Charcoal! this was my fourth consecutively sketchbook and i started using charcoal more than graphite at this point. all of the works in this post is done my varying softness of charcoal on paper. i think that i got a lot better at making quick sketches with good light and contrast in them. I tried to get the basic shapes and shades together and for it to resemble the likeness of a face. the speed was also of the essence. some of theses sketches took ten minutes while some twenty to twenty five.

I really liked working with charcoal as it gives a much higher contrast as compared to graphite and I quite enjoyed that.

[kali-kali-zulfein]

a new sketchbook! this one was exhausted a bit quick and i didn't like a lot of the work I did in this one personally. but I guess thats what sketchbooks are for– to create and improve. anyway here are some more faces and some character studies I did :)

[kali-kali-zulfein]

some more works form the same sketchbook, these include some primitive attempts at shading faces and some more advanced. I also started trying character studies at this point as you can see an attempt at Joey played by Matt LeBlanc in one of the images. also a phase of spider-Man obsession I made a whole page out of it.

[kali-kali-zulfein]

faces. this series consisted mostly of faces and getting the basic proportions right instead of a lot of details. to think of it a lot of my drawings focus on that as I'm still learning a lot. this is my first sketchbook of this series.

all of these have been done in graphite on paper. we explore charcoal later on...