While working on an Etsy order for the USA today, I thought it would be nice to show the process of how I make my posters and postcards. In these videos I am printing an A3+ size poster of my artwork "The Ear Reddening Move", a series of 10 Go postcards picked by the customer and I am manually cutting a postcard sheet to create postcards with the best quality!

Starting today, I am doing a Christmas sale in my Etsy shop.
All items 20% off until the end of the month. 
If you want to support me, this is the perfect opportunity. The 20% discount also extends to the originals of my work that you can find on this website.

I also lowered all my poster prices:
A4 posters (21 x 29.7 cm) for €12.50
A3 posters (29.7 x 42 cm) for €14.95
A3+ posters (32.9 x 48.3 cm) for €15.95

If you are looking to decorate your walls and want to support me, now is your chance.
www.etsy.com/shop/murugandi
Have a great December 2020 everybody!

I added four new items to my Etsy shop.
These are postcards and posters of pet portraits I did of Ruby the cat, for Huifang Deng and Tim van Vliet. Ruby is a cute British longhair with hypnotic green eyes and fluffy hair.

The postcards are A6 size and cost €2,50 each.
For the posters, you can choose between A4, A3 and A3+ size. The prices for these are €12,50, €14,95 and €15,95 respectively. 
All of these works come in different colours of background that you can choose from. The backgrounds are made with an art technique called paper marbling.

I made a footer for the website of Frisbeewinkel. On request, the footer incorporates designs I previously made for the category buttons on the site of Disc Golf, Ultimate Frisbee and Dog Frisbee. This represents the range of frisbee sports the company stands for and the articles the website sells. The green mountains in the background have a similar colour to the thumbnails I made and are in line with the colours of Frisbeewinkel's logo.

I made more thumbnail designs for Frisbeewinkel, the biggest frisbee store of the Netherlands. These are visible on the website when you hover with your mouse over the banner with product categories at the top of the screen. 
This is the third category that I am making designs for: Ultimate Frisbee. Previously I made the thumbnail designs for the categories Disc Golf and Dog Frisbee. Those were easier to make because the titles of each category were self-explanatory and part of a consistent set: For "Putters" I drew a man throwing a putter into a basket, for "Midrange Discs" I designed a figure throwing an up-shot and "Distance Drivers" asked for a design of a person driving a disc, and so forth. The Ultimate Frisbee category was a bit different: the five titles of this category are "Logo, Star and Tribal Prints", "Junior Ultimate Discs", "Custom Frisbees", "Ultimate Accessories" and "Sand Socks". These titles are more varied and less in line with each other, and it did not make sense to try and directly translate these into a visual equivalent. Instead I decided to use ultimate frisbee players in action, in line with the 'action shots' I used for disc golf and dog frisbee, to form a consistent visual story throughout the website. The last two titles "Ultimate Accessories" and "Sand Socks" felt too out of sync if I used in-action-designs as well, so for those I used two characteristic products, a cap and a sock!  

#ultimate #ultimatefrisbee #frisbeeshop #frisbeewinkel

About a month ago I made six illustrations for a new beginners go book by the Dutch Go Association (Nederlandse Go Bond), depicting go players through the ages.
The book is now printed and landed in my mail box yesterday. It is called "De Kunst van Go" (The Art of Go) and has 72 pages full of pictures, rules and exercises for Dutch readers who want to learn the game. The photos in the book are really nice and show all sorts of different European go players, from pretty girls crunching their brains to kids playing pair-go with their grandparents. 

I am always grateful when friends and acquaintances reach out to me for art commissions. This time I was approached by my friend Tim van Vliet and his wife Huifang "Jenny" Deng (邓慧芳).
Jenny asked me to design a cover for her PhD thesis, titled Source attribution of human toxoplasmosis - A quantative microbial risk assessment approach.

Quoting the thesis: Toxoplasmosis, known by its Latin name Toxoplasma gondii, "is a single-celled zoonotic parasite, which has a worldwide distribution. It can infect virtually all warm-blooded animals, including humans, mammals and birds. It was first discovered in Tunisia and Brazil in 1908 and named a year after based on its crescent‐shaped morphology (Toxoplasma means ‘arc form’ in Greek) and the host species in which they were detected (a rodent, Ctenodactylus gundi) (Dubey, 2008). It belongs to the phylum of Apicomplexa together with other species, but is the only known member of the genus Toxoplasma."

This parasite is also strongly linked to cats. Wikipedia reads: "Toxoplasmosis is usually spread by eating poorly cooked food that contains cysts, exposure to infected cat feces, and from an infected mother to her baby during pregnancy. Rarely, the disease may be spread by blood transfusion. It is not otherwise spread between people. The parasite is known to reproduce sexually only in the cat family."​

The main objectives of the thesis: "To identify and prioritize successful prevention strategies, it is important to attribute the burden of toxoplasmosis to specific sources. QMRA is a useful tool to collect all available data on different aspects so that the data can be used for source attribution. In this thesis, we focused on the assessment of relative attribution of different sources (namely different meat products and soil) to human T. gondii infection in the Netherlands by using a quantitative microbial risk assessment approach. In addition, we implemented the QMRA model of meat-borne T. gondii infection from the Netherlands for the mainland of China, where consumers have different consumption habits." 

Jenny had recently seen my drawing of a go playing cat and knew that I previously designed a PhD cover for another friend of mine. After our initial brainstorm session, the first concept was to have cellular shapes of the parasite on the cover and to incorporate a leopard skin pattern, based on a Chinese saying: 管中窥豹，可见一斑。Translating to: "Look at one spot on a leopard and visualize the whole animal - extrapolate; conjure up the whole through seeing a part of it." An interesting metaphor in relation to microscopic research and the prevention of parasitic infection spread, both zooming in on small areas in order to understand the bigger picture. Jenny also asked if I could draw a small cat for the back side of the cover. Soon we figured out that it should not be just any cat: why not her cat, Ruby? 

Ruby is a funky cat with an intense and crazy stare, so I looked forward to capturing her in a drawing. I started working on the cover and I used a scientific drawing of the parasite that Jenny sent me to create the outlines of basic shapes. I used the characteristic banana shape of the parasite, multiplied that and filled them purely with leopard skin patterns, but it looked too abstract. I realized that the link between the leopard skin and the parasite itself had to be explicitly visible to make the metaphor work, so I combined the leopard skin shapes with the scientific drawing of the parasite. The link became evident, but something was still missing, so I decided to take the idea of the cat on the back side of the thesis and put it on the front instead: the parasites + the host. I made a crude first sketch of the cat and started playing around with the positioning of the cat versus the parasite-shapes, until I came up with the idea of the "thought bubbles" that you see in cartoons: the balloon in which the thoughts of a comic's character are drawn. I aligned the parasite-shapes in such a way that they started from the top of Ruby's head and grew from small to big. Now it looked like the cat, with its intense eyes, was actually spacing out and thinking of parasites! Fitting also in a sense that parasites can change the mental behavior of their host, but that's more of an afterthought, something I realize now that I'm writing.
Jenny liked this idea for the cover, so I started working on the drawing of Ruby, which I did fully in Photoshop. The main things I focused on were her fluffy hair and her big, green eyes.

The cat for the cover of the PhD was done, but I liked the idea of a cat in the corner of the back side as well, so I decided to draw a second Ruby. This time a sleeping one, as a wink at taking a rest after you've read the entire thesis, but also because sleeping cats are just cute. I added some foot prints to create the illusion of a cat walking around, inspired by the title screen of the short anime film Cat Soup. The foot prints are also a wink at the way parasites spread: they travel along with their hosts.

We ended up selecting Calibri as the font for the title of the thesis. Normally I would be against this, but Jenny requested it and it fits the design nicely. It was a lot of fun to draw cats and to design my second PhD thesis cover. Thank you, Jenny!

If you like my artwork of these cats: you can get them as posters and postcards in my Etsy shop. 

Gissella Gastin and Luciano Salerno asked me to participate in the Sala de Arte of the Congreso Virtual Latinoamericano de Go. The congress is organized by the Federación Iberoamericana de Go and the Asociación Argentina del Juego de Go and is taking place as I type, until 11 October. The Sala de Arte is an online gathering of go inspired art, some of which is especially made for the occasion. My entry is one of circa 30 and includes three of my "classic" go designs: The Tortoise Shell, the Go Butterfly and my most recent go artwork, Sniffing the Third Line (a cat playing go). 

All entries for the Sala de Arte were also shown on the Twitch channel of AAdeGo:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/763714342 (my art starts around minute 31:30)
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/763772347

Especially my turtle was popular amongst the viewers. Even Fernando Aguilar, famous in the South American go world, typed a few words about this go shape that is more powerful than a ponnuki and is said to be worth 50 points.

It is nice to see that go related art is being appreciated and is getting attention in such a big event. Thank you Gissella and Luciano for the organization and let's make more go art in the future! 

Hans Krens from Frisbeewinkel asked me to design a starter set for disc golf beginners. The set consists of three discs: a putter, a midrange and a driver. Hans is not only a frisbee fanatic, he is also very involved in aquaponics, plant cuttings and he cares about the environment. His concept for the starter set combines his passions for frisbee and nature: three flying insects that represent the different characteristics of the discs.

Bumblebee 
Putter
Speed: 3
Glide: 4 
Turn: -0,5 
Fade: 2

Bumblebees are slow and gentle. They are furry, puffy creatures that bumble about pollinating their environment. A perfect insect for a putter, a slow type of disc that is mostly used for shots close to the basket or to throw straight lines. 
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Stag Beetle
Stable Midrange
Speed: 5,5
Glide: 4
Turn: -0,5
Fade: 2

Stag beetles have mean looking jaws and a tight protective armor. They are bigger and more powerful than the bumbelee, and believe it or not, good fliers! Perfect for a midrange, which can handle more distance and power than a putter and is mostly used for upshots or long straight lines. 
​ 

Dragonfly
Understable Driver
Speed: 8
Glide: 4
Turn: -1
Fade: 2

Dragonflies are majestic creatures. They have the most impressive wings and eyes, consisting of so many small parts and details. Faster than the bumbelee and the stag beetle by far, dragonflies live up to their name. This disc is an understable driver, which means it is used for distance throws and wants to curve towards the right when thrown with pace. 

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Just like my last disc golf design, this project had some time pressure behind it. I just moved to my new apartment, many boxes were standing around waiting to be unpacked and curtains and lamps had to be bought. Then Hans called me: if I could make three designs within the next 4 to 5 days. I'm proud I managed to do so and I am even more proud of the results! Lately I am getting more art commissions and I definitely feel like I'm growing and honing my skills. 
These discs will become available at Frisbeewinkel.nl in the next few weeks. They will come in three different colours. I will also sell these designs as posters and postcards in my Etsy shop.

Joost Vlieg, disc golf player and employee of Next Move, asked me to make a logo for the disc golf Winter League in Groningen and surroundings. The winter league starts in October 2020 and will consist of an indoor putting league every Thursday and a sanctioned event once a month in Stadspark Groningen.
There was no clear concept for the logo, which as a designer is both difficult and fun, because I was free to make what I wanted, but did not have any guidelines to work with. After talking some more and asking some specific questions, it became apparent that "winter" had to be the main theme. Joost also told me that the league will be sponsored by Next Move, Eagles Wings disc golf and Prodigy Disc. The name "Eagles Wings" immediately resonated with me as a designer, since I often use animals in my drawings, and I suggested that I'd include an eagle in the logo. Joost was enthusiastic about it and quickly after I came up with the idea of a basket being part of a snowman and an eagle throwing a disc in the chains. I ended up making two versions, one in color to be used for the promotion of the league, and one in black and white to be used for the printing of discs. Most likely the design will be printed on discs as a hot stamp, so I am excited to see how those will turn out. 

Time pressure was lifted to a new level for this design, not only because I have several design projects lined up and because the deadline for this design was end of September, but also because I am in the midst of moving to a new apartment. It is a crazy busy time for me and I keep surprising myself with the time and energy I don't have but somehow find anyway.

I'm looking forward to the disc golf Winter League and to joining at least one of the events to chuck a disc with my own design!