The idea for Project BAD-MASH grew out of the many lengthy discussions HeadAnt and Mutant had on BAD taking over Delhi and leaving its mark everywhere. And what better way to re-imagine an entire city in your characteristic style than redoing some of the city’s loved characters in your own way. With that idea in mind, Project BAD-MASH grew.
For Mutant, observing people and things and interpreting them in his own way comes easy. But what became a challenge was to select which characters would he work on. And this is where the entire team stepped in. After rounds of consultation over a zillion cups of coffee, we zeroed in on our favourite five Delhi people: Selfie Queen, Delhi Hipster, Swagger Boy, Jhola Aunty and Broker Uncle. And then came our favourite part – observing these characters at all places from malls to sabji stalls and forwarding to Mutant anything we considered a quirk and could be incorporated in his caricatures. So we almost started mouthing dialogues the Jhola aunty would most likely say and everytime we entered a coffee shop we looked around for a hipster dude armed with his unwanted gyaan. (FYI, they were the easiest to spot anyway.)
And while creating them was the lengthier part, detailing became the fun part. And after multiple additions and re-designings, we had our first set of BAD-MASH characters ready. To heighten the mystery before we finally revealed the characters, Resonant came up with these GIFs which were more like jigsaw puzzles. In the entire process, Mutant realised designing characters is one thing and adapting them to various products is a different ball game altogether. So while, the designs were initially made for posters, with time we realised with all the detailing they were better suited for t-shirts. And that is how the BAD-MASH t-shirts came to be. But even then, for every product, there was some modification that needed to be made. For mugs, we had to do away with the quotes and phrases which were part of the original design and for T-shirts we had to do use different colours altogether as most printers did not use the colours we used.
In the entire process, Mutant realised designing characters is one thing and adapting them to various products is a different ball game altogether. So while, the designs were initially made for posters, with time we realised with all the detailing they were better suited for t-shirts. And that is how the BAD-MASH t-shirts came to be. But even then, for every product, there was some modification that needed to be made. For mugs, we had to do away with the quotes and phrases that we initially used and for t-shirts, we had to do use different colours altogether as most printers did not use the colours that we used.
Choosing a printer proved to be the most difficult part in the entire process and as Mutant puts it, “Delhi ke andar printers bohot lousy hai.” While most of them did not do the kind of print we wanted, almost all of them lacked the colours we used. We learnt printers in Delhi use only CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) and that meant we change our shades. We did it grudgingly but we had to give in.
Finally after many months of ideating, designing, re-designing, printing on paper, rendering, adapting, receiving and rejecting samples, we finally found one sample we liked. But given, the fact that we took them for printing only two weeks before Diwali we could get only Selfie Queen and Delhi Hipster designs printed. And this is how they look:
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