“I heard of the challenge through a friend, and just loved the idea! Pratham Books does some fantastic work and this challenge was a great opportunity for me to contribute to their work in spreading literacy and the love of reading. I support the idea of open-source publishing too, and think this is a great way to get people sharing ideas and their creativity. I had a blast illustrating my story, and would have loved to illustrate every word in the matrix if I’d had the time! In fact, I started with six very different words and a very different story, and was well on my way to drawing it up.. when the image of the flying woman just popped into my head and refused to leave. Then the kid followed, and the idea of the sky as a sort of giant chalkboard…. and before I knew it, I was drawing a completely different story!”
A Story With Happiness Written All Over It – Lavanya Karthik’s Entry for the #6FrameStoryChallenge
We’re glad that Lavanya Karthik had such a blast while weaving a visual story around the 6 words that she picked: flying woman, mango, dance, river, parachute, starry night sky. In fact, her joy has slipped into her 6-frame story and has been splashing around noisily. Doesn’t her visual story have happiness written all over it? Fruits orbiting around each other and musical aliens – life beyond Earth seems far more appealing!
Curious about why Lavanya decided to participate in the #6FrameStoryChallenge and her experience of it? Here’s what she said:
(Lavanya Karthik lives in Mumbai where she writes, draws, runs and eats way too much chocolate. She cannot think of a better job than the one she has right now – writing and illustrating books for children. She also writes weird tales about three-headed women and clockwork tigers, draws comics for magazines like Youth Inc. and the Rundown,and chronicles her real and imaginary life graphically in Maya Bizarre. You can see her work here: https://lavanyakarthik.wordpress.com/, https://www.facebook.com/pages/Maya-Bizarre/241958599150578)
Read the other interviews by illustrators who took the challenge:
Rajiv Eipe, Kalyani Ganapathy, Prashant Miranda, Kavita Singh Kale, Megha Vishwanath, Priya Nair Panicker, Sweta Roy Choudhury, Paneendra Suresh, Priya Kuriyan, Yulianto Qin, Manjari Chakravathi, Sonal Goyal and Sumit Sakhuja, Samidha Gunjal, Preeti Lata, Shwetha Elisha,Mithila Ananth, Sunandita Mehrotra, Vedavathi Narasimha Murthy, Jithin Jacob, Vidya Gopal,Archana Sreenivasan, Somesh Kumar, Gumani, Antara Mukherji, Anjora Noronha,Vinayak Varma, Soumya Menon, Jisha Unnikrishnan, Kruttika Susarla, Ninoshka Dias, Isha S Valentine, Neelima Raparla, Vallabhi Shegaonkar, Sangeeta Das, Hari Kumar Nair,Lakhsmi Mitter, Lily Banerjee, Aditi Dilip, Niloufer Wadia, Deepa Jayaraman, AnupamaApte, Nishith Mehta, Muhammed Shafi, Amar Soni, Krishna Prakash K,Lavanya Karthik, Sonal Gupta,Kabini Amin, Jason Dvorak, Tanvi Bhat, Ranjani S, Shikha Nambiar, Aritra Roy Chowdhury, Vaishali Chudasama, Sharanya Kunnath, Priya Manikandan, Milan Nayak, Delwyn Remedios, Geetanjali B, Ambica Vinod, Shailja Jain Chougule, Chitra Chandrashekhar, Nikita Modi, David Knight, Geetali Tare, Nilomee Jesrani
If you missed the #6FrameStoryChallenge, but are inspired by the work of fellow illustrators and want to contribute to the open source story platform – do send us your stories! Story guidelines are available here.