Why do people say “God Bless You” when you sneeze?

In the medieval time, people thought that when you sneeze, your soul leaves your body through the nose and you are dead for that millisecond of time. This happens within 500th of a second. Your eyes get close, your heart best stops, your body gets sucked and start getting goose bumps all over and you really can not do anything.

There is a saying that devil/demon always sleeps on your nose and always finds a way to get inside your body. Now, within that meantime, when he finds your body without a soul, he tries to get inside before your own soul gets inside your body.



But if somebody says “God Bless You”, they protect you from the bad spirits or that devil from entering and possessing your body and your soul gets a chance to get back in it.

This piece of work had been done for an Airtel advertisement during my internship at “Famous house of Animation”. There were 7-8 characters that I had to design and this is one of them. The name of this character is "Lans Nayak Badrinath" from Coochbihar.

Once I was happy with this character, I scanned it and placed the sketches on the machine and start cleaning up using Photoshop.



After cleanup, I put a base texture to get a grunge effect and a base colour in the cloth and the cap. Then, I added a base colour to it, to give it a nice dark/gloomy feeling. And then added some light rays also from top right.

Then I starts colouring the body with flat colours and with flat tonal variation and then start merging it slowly-slowly. Always use different layers and folders for different colours and shades. It helps you to alter later if you need to make changes.




After the coloring process is complete you need to add some shading. Shading makes the character look 3 dimensional and real. So I had applied light and shade considering the light source and the light reflection and refractions.






Here is a detail look of the face.



Here's the final piece!

From left- Ratika Bakshi, Shantanu Jog, Biju Neyyan

























Don't Drink and drive.





















This is one of my favorite illustration, done in my college days.
Its our college canteen (Delhi college of Art), our favorite time-pass/hangout place . But now the canteen has move to some other place.