i won a trip to italy in let’s comics competition.
so i am going to lucca (tuscany) in november to the lucca comics and games fair.
yeaheeeeey!

lucca is very famous for its intact renaissance-era city walls… the old town remained intact as the city expanded and modernized.
i am so excited for that trip!

starting to prepare from now…  ;)

the brief of the competition was to give your point of view about ‘multicultural societies’.
here’s the story i presented:

.
did you know that cockroaches have family & friends which they recognize by their distinctive odors

• they have faster reflexes than humans; even faster than Michael Jordan’s
• they have one great big nerve on tails alerting them to danger from behind
• they breathe through their sides – not their noses
• they are able to make group decision-making and competition exists in cockroaches’ world
• a cockroach can live up to a week without its head. it only dies because it can’t drink
• they have a mosaic vision, which is excellent at detecting motion

and what we just do is kill it!

“alert everyone! alert!  please do not enter room!  a cockroach is living inside with it’s wife and kids. please evacuate the building… ”
“best way to kill cockroaches: hit it so hard so that you don’t hear its sound cracking”

they never killed poeple or raped girls. so why this mission of eliminating all cockroaches

why not like just holding it and putting it outside. w khalas!

here are some of the illustrations for  “موهبة” Mawhiba’s monthly article.
this issue is about Alhazen.
of all articles i enjoyed this one the most, since i had the chance to experience bits of the arabic magical mood, old cloth…

another article illustration for “موهبة” Mawhiba (Saudi magazine aiming to encourage young talented people); this time about Graham Bell.

Bell was obsessed with sounds from since he started reasoning. the article tells how he was trying once to hear the sound of the corn plant growing up…
here’s where the title page illustration is from:

some illustrations from the article:

i took a workshop with jorj abou mhaya (a great illustrator) where we focused on characters illustration (some history, tips and practice…). jorj is giving now a workshops on sketching & the drawing basics. if you are interested this is the links on facebook

i had some time this weekend to scan some of my sketches and share them with you.. enjoy!
you can click on the last one to enlarge.. it’s much better on bigger scale.

i was one of the participants of the project: Beyroutes, A guide to Beirut. the result of the project is a book that was launched last saturday (6 march 2010).

Beyroutes, unlike any other guide to Beirut, presents a whole different way of touring in Beirut… a way that takes “the human infrastructure as a point of departure”. it offers a variety of subjective explorations of the city and it’s layers. it  shows the “complexity of how one gets to know this city, its inhabitants, its buildings, and everyday life.”

i was one of many other illustrators, photographers, writers, artists… that were asked to explore a chosen region inside Beirut, to have a personal understanding of it, and express it in our way.

following is my contribution to this project. you can click on the image for a bigger view and better read

crops from the artworks:

this guide project and it’s preceding workshops were an initiative of the members of Studio Beirut, supported by Archis, Partizan Publik, and the Pearl Foundation.

here are some teasers of what you can find in this guide

this was a very small project for a friend Khajag Apelian who did his masters in type design. Khajak designed Arek -the type face that you can see in the pictures- as as a thesis for his masters. it’s an armenian typeface specifically designed for school books. for his type specimen book he chose two stories to illustrate:
La Fontaine – The Crow and the Fox . the second is an armenian tale about a mouse that lost her tail
so i did the following pencil drawings..

“موهبة” Mawhiba is a Saudi organization aiming to encourage young talented people and helping them develop their talents.
i illustrated an article inside a monthly magazine for Mawhiba organization; the magazine also called  Mawhiba.
the article “Edison before Edison” talks about the life of Thomas Edison, with a focus on his childhood and some of his adventures.

above is the first option i presented to Mohtaraf (who was commissioned to redesign the magazine), but it turned out to be too childish, so i did the following:
(i know the above is more attractive, but you have to take the audience into consideration)

what absorbed me the most in Edison’s life is the unconventional child that he was and his strange ideas. once his parents caught him sitting on swamp’s eggs… he was convinced to get baby swamps that he would’ve made

here are some pages of the article

i was part of the team who worked on Vitrine’s visual creation, and communication material. and i have to say the crew working on this play is amazing!
i learned a lot during the process starting from Nehmeh’s patience and calmness even under stress, David‘s visual expertise, William‘s conceptional creative mind, and Elias calmness.
am going to watch today the final rehearsals and am already excited to see Joulia & Aida, the costumes, the make-ups, and hear Christelle Franca’s music (who’s gona be playing live btw).

go and watch it, great minds, great expertise, great artists, are behind that performance!!
it’s gona be played every thursday, friday, saturday and  sunday at 8:30 pm
at Al Madina theatre  starting tomorrow.

this is the poster, click on the image to see high-res image

some applications (flyer, bookmark, invitation card)

here’s the bookmark which was done before the poster on a very tight deadline

and the dusty window that i stole from a construction site near our studio
yes i returned it back! no i didn’t! haha
it’s where we erased the word Vitrine from.

christmas is all about show off and over-consumption for me. this is not the message behind this painting although i called it “christmas painting”; actually no christmas messages are intended in it. but this is rather my solution for what i hate in christmas. i went with the movement saying: do your gifts instead of buying them. and here’s my present to my beautiful big sister.

by the way i just noticed the green + red colors of the painting… yes a complete coincidence

detail with the shadow of some cloth

painting + camera + lighting + photoshop  wouhououou  that’s the best!

some sketches

i was part of the team working on the process of the new initiative by casfekra: createseats.com

in short the idea behind createseats is this: instead of buying those generic passe-par-tout gifts, casafekra aims to help create “thought-of” personal gifts that leave people feeling appreciated. read more on the blog post of casafekra: “the one with the personal secret…”

for this .:there for design… came up with the concept of “lamiss” the ashamed ostrich. “lamiss” was a perfect representation of  the feeling people get when they give those lame gifts. that’s because when the ostrich puts it’s head in the ground, most people perceive it’s action as shame or fear.

bref, i did the illustration of the first draft visual of the idea (at that time we were still thinking that “lamiss” is a person)

and i then worked with team .:there for design… developing the visual.
bellow you can see some of the visual process. to see the complete process, visit blog .:there for design…

and here’s the final result

the fun part was in the process! collecting tree leaves, dried fruits and flowers from a public garden next to our studio, cutting, gluing, photo-shooting, photo-retouching. again you can see it all on blog .:there for design…

this is an illustration (done by me) that team .:therefordesign… gave for casafekra and casafekra middle-east congratulating them for becoming the exclusive agents of green-italy in lebanon and the middle-east.

you can see william (founder of .:therefordesign…) taking care of all the technical stuff, me painting, and assaad (founder of casafekra) making sure the ® is next to the logo. each taking a character close to real life. janine 3am bet nazzer w malek 3am bi kharreb

this is a poster i did for a christmas concert in Sheileh (village in Keserwan).  you can see below the poster worked out from sketches, color options to the final poster. the singers are Elite and Jalal Possik, siblings with an incredible voice by the way.

i wanted the poster to show a certain mood (christmas, music, spirituality), the illustration helped showing the spiritual-music part, with the two siblings singing, in a style rather humble then extravagant. and i used only color as reference for christmas (which helped reduce cliché elements in the poster like christmas decoration and trees and…). you can see the details of the concert below if you are interested to attend.

the festival happens each year in st. rafka sheileh. people can participate in games
like ping-pong, scrabble, cards…

my favorite: