What Possessed Me

Monsoon season

It's monsoon season in New York - sheets of rain, dramatic lightening and thunder, and menacing skies.

I love this post today on the monsoons in India on Rang: The Colours of Life.





The rain is wonderful - especially with a cup of chai.




All photos from Archanasr's Flickr.

Eye Break: Riyaz Design

I may have mentioned that I have a little thing for miniature paintings. It started in Turkey and went slightly haywire in India. I've got the mini bug - big time.

Then I saw something in Elle Decor many moons ago that caught my eye. Miniature...but different.



Riyaz Design is collaboration between English artist, Alexander Gorlizki and master miniature painter, Riyaz Uddin. They live and work in Jaipur, Rajasthan, where Alexander creates the composition and Riyaz executes the design using single hair brushes and hand-ground pigments. The result is a playful and celebratory subversion of a 400 year-old tradition:








Riyaz Design also offers stationary, package design, and “enchanted portraits” like this one:



What’s better than Sly Stallone in chintz? NOTHING, I tell you. Nothing.

Technical issues

My page has been so wonky these days - it's slow to load, the browser locks - I don't know what's going on and it's completely maddening.

Throwing my hands up in defeat, I took down everything but the bare essentials and created a separate site in Google Page Creator to hold some of the more problematic elements such as photo slide shows.

Click here to check out the site and view my mini photo essays from India and Ethiopia.

Though I was somewhat annoyed about having to take stuff off my blog and create a whole other page to host those elements, Googlepage is kind of fun, especially if you know very little about HTML. You can create a new page and manage it very easily - a good resource if you want to create a simple, straightforward website.