Chopsticks

This is the prototype for my chopsticks with forks.

Sugarcane grown for fuel in Brazil

Sugarcane grown to power Brazil's cars and trucks as an alternative to climate-warming fossil fuels has a beneficial side effect: it also cools the local air temperature, scientists reported Sunday.Brazil’s government plans to boost investment in sugar-cane plantations by 60.5 billion reais ($35.4 billion) during the next four years to ensure an adequate supply of crops for the nation’s ethanol industry. Almost the entire sugarcane production in India is used for producing sugar.


Ethanol can have only a limited impact on India's energy security. 
stamp design for Brazil country:

Process

ALL agree that the crisis is inevitable. In fact, the Oil crash has already began. 95% of all the recoverable oil has been found now. Today about 90% of vehicular fuel needs are met by oil. This means, oil plays an important part in transportation. I started researching about the production of oil, economics, population and political issues behind the production of oil by today’s oil companies. After reading and watching documentation videos by Nation Geographic, I understood that it is very broad subject and multiple interpretations can be made in future.
I then came across that we could obtain fuel from water, coffee etc and such hypothetical concepts fascinated me. These are not so popular concepts but I feel which will be seen in future. Some of the theories are:

1.       Run your car on water: just by adding gasoline pill in water, the hydrogen molecule will be separated and fuel from hydrogen is possible.

2.       Fuel from coffee grounds is possible.

3.       Fuel from sugar cane. A large chunk of the Brazilian cane production is used for ethanol manufacture today. Since cane is manufactured in many countries I feel obtaining fuel from cane will solve many problems in future.

4.       Fuel from the plant algae.

5.       Use our friends to run. The future generation will return back to horses, cows, and bulls.

I had planned to make a book, with fiction illustrations depicting the scenes in the future. The illustrations would be based on facts. But I thought the form was inappropriate and wouldn’t be that impactful. I wanted to apply my research to make people aware of these concepts.  I then thought of making post stamps for the countries in which the above theories will be seen. This will create awareness about the unpopular sources of fuel in coming years.

 (I  will soon upload a better chart of all the stamp collections) 

Concept Art: City

Process:

Developing an idea for a future city involved taking inspirations from real life objects and then coming up with more ideas that could possibly develop into a city about 50 years from now. Inspiration was taken from artists like Dylan Cole and Feng Zhu who work a lot on designing environments in the field of concept art.

I restricted myself to digital drawing on Adobe Photoshop, and did not use any other software for creating all the works. I wanted to explore as many possibilities as I could in the past few weeks. One thing I realized was that this was less about the software, and more about hand drawing skills, which I wanted to sharpen. Reaching a high standard would probably take a few more years, and was practically impossible to reach in a few weeks. Combining that with digital media makes work much more interesting in many ways. But it was a great place to start with.

Initial Sketches

The idea about a suspended city was inspired by hanging crystal lamps. The sketches shown were developed digitally and then work was started to create a possible view of the city. The process involved developing a color palette

Idea:

I imagine that after global warming, the level of water will rise drastically and there would be a lot of environmental changes. Probably in the next 70 years or something the cycle of the moon and planets would change, because of a solar storm. That would cause a lot of changes in the planetary tides, which would ultimately lead to cities that could drown, almost everyday. The change in color of the sky would also be more dramatic

Color Palette Development

Suspended buildings that could take the pressure and the flow of the water was one possible solution. When the water level rises, the building would act like miniature submarines. That way the normal everyday life would happen inside the spherical buildings, without actually being affected by the change in the planet.

The buildings would be connected with flexible material that would allow people to move from one area to the other. Possible vegetation could be done inside. Some of the buildings can serve as gas tanks, that provide air and oxygen to the rest of the city. Few buildings could provide water, and they would have all filtration facilities. Since the buildings are connected, pipelines that travel along with it could travel all the material as well.

Underwater concept

Transport in the city could be possible by means of miniature submersibles that would work when the tide rises. The spherical structure of the buildings would stand the pressure of water from all sides. During the non-tide hours, the builds could probably open up, somewhat like the blooming of a flower.

Monochrome drawing

Developing the final image involved the research of a lot of experimentation with digital drawing techniques and color studies. The final artwork shows the scene of the city during sunset/sunrise. References from real images were incorporated within this.

Final Concept Art

Algae Can Be The New Oil

OriginOil’s breakthrough technology, based on algae, is targeted at fundamentally changing the world’s source of oil without disrupting the environment or food supplies.
Ubiquitous and easy to grow, algae has long been a promising biomass-to-fuel candidate in the eyes of researchers.  Of course, hurdles still exist to make a competitive fuel. 



Benefits of Producing Algae Oil 

Algae is fast growing – each oil-producing cell can mature in just hours Algae is oil-rich — contains as much as 60% of its dry weight in oil Algae is carbon neutral – meaning that it does not affect climate like petroleum Algae is fuel efficient – as much as 1000 times more productive than corn

inspired from how the plant algae grows, one of my design for the stamp:

Run your car on water in future.

Water has 2.5 times more Hydrogen than gasoline or diesel.

Benefits of using Supplemental Hydrogen:

• It is very Inexpensive to produce - the hydrogen is produced from water
  and it uses very little.
• It is extremely Clean - It will actually burn the carbon deposits in your engine and the byproduct is water making it very environmentally friendly.
• It is very Safe -  It is safer than any other fuel source currently being used because it is not stored but rather used as it is produced.
• It is Affordable - Right now you can either build a supplemental hydrogen unit for about $200 or you can purchase fully functional units starting at $247

Most of the research is done inJAPAN.

My stamps design for Japan country:

Most of the research is done inJAPAN.

My stamps design for Japan country:

Could coffee be the alternative fuel of the future? or then we could just fly

Researchers from the University of Nevada, Reno, have discovered that coffee can be turned into an alternative fuel other than caffeine: biodiesel. And you can have your coffee and drink it too.
my stamp design:

Will we learn to fly in future?

Info graphic of the movies

After various attempts to make an info graphic showing all that I have learnt from watching these movies. I had various issues with trying to abstract and incorporate all the elements of each movie. But as I tried finding elements of each movie I realized that a lot of them are not common factors.
This info graphic in fact does not have the time lines I posted about previously. As it did not fit with the info graphic I decided to make that separately. I will be posting those time lines soon. I am now hoping to find a different way representing the information I got out of the movies.
Right now the elements which I have incorporated are time travel and movies where time is an abstraction. Along with time travel there is the usual aspects as to why one would time travel, hey need something that would help them travel in time, what they are changing by going back int ime and what gave them the opportunity to go back in time. Almost every movie that has time travel will have to deal with these main aspects or address them at soem point of time. The issue with this is that although they address it they are  not clearly defined. So as this element is subjective it leaves one feeling unsure about the dissection of the movies itself.
My issue with these main topics is that they are very basic. They do not give justice to the story of the movie and does not give the opportunity to go into the greater details of time travel itself.
Apart from that the aesthetics of the info graphic itself are not satisfactory.