Little wonders

KOCHI: One is often under the belief that drawing is an art only a few are blessed with. But dispelling that myth is Ibrahim Badusha through his doodle cartoons. He is making this art accessible to one and all. “Anyone and everyone can draw cartoons,” says Ibrahim Badusha, a cartoonist who has been teaching children easy ways to draw animals, birds and other objects in cartoons. Give Badusha an alphabet from English, Tamil, Hindi or Malayalam, and he manages to scribble a cartoon of an animal or bird within seconds. Through his sketches one sees how easy and effortless drawing can be. Though there are many who draw doodles out of alphabets and numbers, Badusha tries something different. “I try to make doodles of alphabets for what they stand for. For example if ‘A’ stands for ant, making the cartoon of ant is what I do. If ‘Z’ stands for Zebra, making a zebra out of Z is the way my doodles stand out,” says Badusha, who has been specialising the art of doodle-making for more than five years. When one hears about doodle-making, it might seem simple and easy but Badusha tells us that it requires a lot of patience, creativity and imagination. “We can make anything using an alphabet but making the doodles of only animals or birds from A to Z or in any other language alphabet is tough.” Badusha has brought out 20 books on art and drawing cartooning doodles of animals, vegetables, caricature making and the like. While most people tend to try their hand at paintings and other abstract work, what prompted him to take up cartooning as his forte, you ask, “I always liked cartoons. But some eight years back when I searched for an training institute to learn it, I could find none. Nor was there any book from where cartoon drawing was taught. So I learnt on my own and I was convinced that it held a lot of scope,” says Badusha, a regular face in Amrita TV’s ‘Easy Drawing’ programme and in Malayalam Manorama’s daily coloumn ‘Ningalkkum Varachu Padikkam’. “The focus of my programmes is to learn and draw. In my books along with teaching doodles, explanations are also given about the animal, bird or thing that is drawn. Itis completely knowledge based. For example as part of Mother’s Day, in ‘Ningalkkum Varachu Padikkam’ coloumn, drawing mother from the letter M was the lesson taught. Thereby children will remember which day is special for what,” says this 27-year-old artist.Badusha is also famous for his one minute caricatures and has drawn and gifted his caricatures to many eminent personalities. “Caricatures is the art of exaggerating the features of a person,” says Badusha who has published cartoon handbooks for Kerala Cartoon Academy. While working in Sai Feature Syndicate, Badusha got chance to make illustrations and cartoons, for leading newspapers and magazines such as Manorama, Labour India, Ajit Daily, Thejus, PCM magazine and Learnware among others.Though animation is being employed  heavily nowadays for everything these days, Badusha believes that cartoons will not lose their importance, “The new generation sees everything visually. And giving them those visual elements can be done through our cartoons. I link both cartoon drawing and animation together. And that is the reason I have brought out a CD where animation characters teach magic. Then in another collection origami is taught through animation,” says Badusha whose ‘cartoons for animation’ (learning cartoons techniques to adapt in animation) are included in the Kerala Syllabus.