Naimisha Press
Making of
How the pictures in our books are made. A reader has the right to know, and the subject asks for care.
Illustrated with AI-assisted tools under human direction — illustrations for reading, not murtis for worship.
Process
The script is written by hand, from the text — the Srimad Bhagavata as Ved Vyasa wrote it and as Gita Press, Gorakhpur publishes it. Every page is thumbnailed by a person, panel by panel: who stands where, what is said, where the eye should go.
The illustrations are then generated with AI-assisted tools from those thumbnails and from reference we gathered ourselves, under direction, pass after pass, until the page says what the script says and nothing else. Lettering, typesetting in three languages and the design of the book are done by hand. No page leaves without a person having looked at every panel.
Rejected passes
Most of what the tools produce is rejected. A hand with six fingers is easy to catch. A Narada who looks like a Renaissance saint is harder to catch, and matters more.
We keep the rejected passes, and show a few here, so that the word “assisted” means something.
- Image to follow
Rejected pass — anatomy - Image to follow
Rejected pass — costume out of period - Image to follow
Rejected pass — iconography not as the text has it
Iconography review
Before a page is final, its iconography is checked against the text and the tradition: what a figure carries, what they wear, what is permitted to be shown and what is better left to the reader.
Where the tradition is not one thing, we chose, and the notes say so. Where we were unsure, we asked people who know more than we do. The mistakes that remain are ours.
Colophon
These are illustrations for reading, not murtis for worship. Nothing in these books is consecrated, and nothing in them should be treated as an object of puja.
We are servants of the text, and not very good ones. We are trying to make a very old story legible to people who might not otherwise open it. If something on a page offends, write to us. We would rather correct it than defend it.
Type: TeX Gyre Pagella (GUST Font License) · Tiro Devanagari Hindi and Tiro Devanagari Marathi (Tiro Typeworks, SIL OFL) · Noto Sans Devanagari (SIL OFL). Print: A4, 400 dpi, coated art paper.