On Monday, fans of Mario Miranda felt a surge of delight as they turned on their computers: the Google search engine decided to mark the celebrated Goan cartoonist’s 90th birth anniversary with a Google Doodle tribute to him on their homepage.
The doodle is filled with the rich, whimsical detail for which Miranda was famous. It shows a rainstorm scene on a crowded Mumbai road – the city where many of Miranda’s cartoons were set. As people run helter-skelter, there is benign chaos in the largely monochrome world. In a window, Miranda himself isworking on a cartoon.
This vision was created by Aaron Renier, who was described by Google as “another comic artist known for portraying large crowds”.
“I approached Mario’s work by pretending I was drawing with him,” Renier told Scroll.in. “I chose his most popular style, very flat with criss-crossing interactions.”
The cartoon, which will be visible on the Google homepage in India, Kazakhstan, Poland, Portugal, Iceland, Sweden and Indonesia, reflects the lush detailing of Miranda’s cartoons. “That is what I liked most about his work,” the American cartoonist explained in a statement released by Google, “trying to pick out who knows who, who’s watching who, who’s annoyed by who, who’s enamored by who. Hopefully people will see something of [Miranda’s] spirit in it.”
Asked on Twitter how he came up with the idea, Renier replied, “I looked at his work, and absorbed and mixed. I went through a few drafts and google picked their favorite. ”
How long did it take for him to come up with the cartoons? “ The ideas were over a few days but the art was done fairly quickly after I got approval [from Google], ” Renier said.
Miranda, who died on December 11, 2011, in his ancestral home in Loutolim, Goa, was conferred India’s highest civilian awards – the Padma Shri in 1988 and the Padma Bhushan in 2002. He was best known for his works published in The Times of India and The Illustrated Weekly of India.
Here are a few of Renier’s other interesting offerings.
Detective Sugartooth: An interactive comic made with pen and ink.
L'ete Top Secret: A book cover.
Spaghetti Dinner Doodle: A sketch.
Past due date: A flyer.
Giant hug: Created with watercolour and ink.
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