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Description
Contemporary Hindu iconic art is, in my reckoning, the third and greatest member of the holy trinity of kitsch, the other two thirds being velvet Elvises, and unicorn paintings. I say the best because unlike the other two, I actually like Hindu iconic art; sometimes even the really bad stuff.

Holy trinities being the order of the day, here's a picture of Brahma, the least-worshipped member of the Hindu trinity. Wikipedia tells me that he's usually seated on a lotus (he grew out of a lotus flower stemming from Vishnu's navel, y'know) and pictured with a sceptre in the form of a spoon, a coconut bowl, Vedas, and prayer beads, so that's what he's got. Of course, my own hunting around for images of Brahma revealed not one single picture in which he was holding this particular combination of knick knacks, so... yay Wikipedia. You've made an original of me.

I spent a lot of time on this; time I should have been spending on other things, but I get a little obsessive/compulsive about ertwerks. Part of what took so long is that I was doing a lot of experimentation with this pic, in terms of vectorization, gradients, and so-on. Good learning experience.

The border came from Clipart Etc. , which has rather a lot of good, hi-res decorative borders, bits, and pieces. I vectorized it (the border image as well as the line art) with Peter Selinger's potrace which I highly recommend as it's fast, free, and does a fantastic job.

Roughed in pencil, "inked" in OpenCanvas, vectorized with potrace, colored in Illustrator 9.

Description
Contemporary Hindu iconic art is, in my reckoning, the third and greatest member of the holy trinity of kitsch, the other two thirds being velvet Elvises, and unicorn paintings. I say the best because unlike the other two, I actually like Hindu iconic art; sometimes even the really bad stuff.

Holy trinities being the order of the day, here's a picture of Brahma, the least-worshipped member of the Hindu trinity. Wikipedia tells me that he's usually seated on a lotus (he grew out of a lotus flower stemming from Vishnu's navel, y'know) and pictured with a sceptre in the form of a spoon, a coconut bowl, Vedas, and prayer beads, so that's what he's got. Of course, my own hunting around for images of Brahma revealed not one single picture in which he was holding this particular combination of knick knacks, so... yay Wikipedia. You've made an original of me.

I spent a lot of time on this; time I should have been spending on other things, but I get a little obsessive/compulsive about ertwerks. Part of what took so long is that I was doing a lot of experimentation with this pic, in terms of vectorization, gradients, and so-on. Good learning experience.

The border came from Clipart Etc. , which has rather a lot of good, hi-res decorative borders, bits, and pieces. I vectorized it (the border image as well as the line art) with Peter Selinger's potrace which I highly recommend as it's fast, free, and does a fantastic job.

Roughed in pencil, "inked" in OpenCanvas, vectorized with potrace, colored in Illustrator 9.