As promised, I have added the "8 Movies I Want to See in 2008-09" drawing of mine to the Gallery.

Click on the above image to view the respective page on the gallery.  There is a detailed description of the drawing, and information about the movies represented there.  I recorded a short video description of the drawing too — I've added a link to that as well.  Finally, as an "extra", there is the uncoloured version of the drawing available too.

Next thing I will be adding to the gallery is a similar entry on my "Classic Movies" drawing.

Here is a drawing that I had done in early September —

This is the “Iron Monger” from the 2008 movie Iron Man, and you could say he is the villain in the movie — and is the product of a superpowered suit being built based on Tony Stark's (Robert Downey Jr) Mark I design.  The character is not known by that name explicitly in the movie, but there is one reference to it in the dialogue, where Obadaiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) says to Stark, “We’re Iron Mongers”.

I did this drawing in pencil and there was minimal touchup done in Photoshop.  Only the addition of the blue tint was done, and the addition of the text.  The text is the lyrics to the song “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath.  This song appears in the end credits of the movie as well.  Of course, the song is about a supervillain rather than a superhero — so while it doesn’t suit Iron Man, I think it is more apt for the Iron Monger!

I spent the last couple of weekends working on a redesign for this site.  After quite a few hours of work, it is now done, and the new design is live!  You should be looking at it now, and as a reminder, here's what the old design looked like —

When the time came for me to re-upload the website after switching to a new host, I was actually thinking of shifting the blog to Wordpress, which the host allows me to set up automatically.  But then, there was no easy way to migrate all my old posts (more than 400) and comments (nearly 300) to Wordpress, and hence I decided to continue using my own custom-coded system.  Still, this was an opportunity to do a redesign, and I decided to reorganise the content a little too.  Comparing the old design and the current one, you'll see that the focus has shifted to the blog, and I've got rid of some infrequently accessed items off the main page.  The current design is actually based on Derek Punsalan's Grid Focus Wordpress theme.  I'm not actually using that theme (because obviously, that is designed for a Wordpress blog), my design is built from scratch, but I followed the Grid Focus theme quite closely.  Dimensionally, I was inspired by the 960 Grid System.

As for the reorganisation of content, I haven't actually deleted anything — if there's anything you're looking for and it's not on the main page, it has been moved to the Archives page.  So what do you think of the new look?

Have a look at this picture that I took a few days back —

Well, it appears that the Dark Knight is standing in daytime, watching over Madhapur, Hyderabad!  You see, I have this small Batman toy that I keep on top of my computer monitor at work.  A few days back, I put it near the window and took a photo.  A bit of cropping resulted in this image which you see above.  You can click that for a slightly larger version.

Well, it took a while, but this website is back online in the form that you are used to seeing!

I shifted hosts recently (from Net4 to Answerable), so it took sometime for the domain and the hosting to be transferred.  Now that the transfer is completed, the site is back.  I am actually planning to do a little redesigning as well (moving out some of the sections that aren't updated etc), and intend to make the site more focused on the blog.

But, here are a couple of videos that I made in the recent past (all of them feature drawings that I have done) —

• Nine Inch Nails: Every Day is Exactly the Same Music Video
• 8 Movies that I want to see in 2008-09
• Classic Movies Drawing

Varun is here in Hyderabad for a few days.  We're going to watch Kung Fu Panda on an IMAX screen tonight.