What is the book that will always be as good as the day you read it first? Although in the past 10 years, you’ve read it at least 8 times, watched the movies at least 35 times, and spent perhaps a 5-months’ worth of hours reading all its legendarium on Wikipedia and all it’s related novels?

The book that bombards your senses with colors, scents and textures of a world so real you can almost feel it. A history so rich you can almost live it. A language so beautiful you feel the urge to learn it. A drawer of characters so well-composed you almost fall in love.

A book that derives the feelings of true joy when being read.

Which book am I talking about?

What would happen to you if boardgames were your idea of torture when your entire family + co are obsessed with them?
Case in hand, a typical Friday after-lunch:

Three different boardgames: parchisi, chess, and backgamon, with cards in the background. What I do to entertain myself is take pictures.

[quiz=2]

In reference to “The Six Crowds you Meet in Heaven”, now with a click of a button, you can find out if you are true Rainbow material. Woohoo!

Please share your results in the comment section, as I am curious to see the results.

Special thanks to Ibra, Phil, and Sabbagh for helping with the questions.

Any ideas for other quizes are more than welcome! :)

One of the most useful things I ever learned in middle-school was in physics (believe it or not). It was quite a simple lesson: lines are the backbone of everything. Al digital imagery is basically a series of lines, including circles, and curves, and everything in between.

That day, I went home and tried it out myself, on MS Paint. Lo, and behold, our physics teacher was right. It was so easy to draw things when you worked with straight lines, rather than anything else.

That’s when my infatuation with digital illustration began. 

Today, I found these old illustrations I used to do in my spare time as a young teenager. We’re talking roughly through 1998 to 2002, when I was 12 to 16 or something like that, and they were all done on MS. Paint. Some of the blurry effects were done on another Microsoft photo editing software. I don’t remember what it was called now, I only discovered it in the very end of my MS Paint life.

Then of course, soon after, I went into design school and fell in love with the most perfect design tool ever; Illustrator, and MS Paint went bye-bye for good.

But I gotta admit that at first I had a really hard time figuring out Illustrator, as it is a very advanced tool and you really cannot draw with lines, although I spent the first couple of years trying :)

Phase 1:

One of my first few experiments. Hand-drawn text. Notice how ragged everything is because it was all composed with lines. The second was composed with scans of text.

Phase 2:
Adding imagery to No Doubt lyrics.

Phase 3:
The discovery of “blur” tools.

Phase 4:
The masterpieces phase :) That’s when I discovered that blur is ugly, and that it’s so much more fun to draw sort of based on reality.
This one for example is quite amazing, if you knew my family then, you’d be able to tell who each one is. Each person is also wearing the most worn outfit they wore that summer. I have two more of these, Dallal Summer ’00, and Dallal Summer ’01.

Well, that’s it I guess. These days I’m experimenting with realistic vector illustrations, which are quite easy but take so long to get done. For example, I started doing this several months ago, but the  only parts of her face that I finished were her eyes, nose and lips.