The flattering tale of a tiny dragon merely made of ink on paper, which one day came to life, reached out to grab a “pause break” button, or climbed up a stair made of stacked coins or simply rode a toy car to who-knows-where. The simplicity of the tiny little creature trapped as a form of art, never giving up on anything and never failing to surprise us with his unfinished ventures, is not only adorable, but admirable as well.
The creators of Drogo, Manik and Ratan, brought the dragon to life by adding live objects and finding ways to show Drogo interacting with them. The adorable little dragon’s curiosity knows no bounds. He explores the different objects and every now and then trips and falls, or gets his tailed crushed by a Nokia phone or simply grabs a pair of balloons and flies away with a Christmas cap on.
Dhaka Tribune talks to Drogo’s creators to know the story behind his come-about:
When did your love for sketching first develop?
Like all other kids we both loved drawing from our very early childhood. Because of our love for drawing, our mother admitted us in Jessore Shishu Academy when we were kindergarteners. But we didn't like it at all! We attended only one class and never went back, may be because, we liked to draw cartoon instead of typical village sceneries or nature which what they all seemed to make us do all the time.
In our school life, instead of doing home work, we covered up our notebook with doodles and random scribbles. And surprisingly, our parents never discouraged us to draw, even though we were always behind on our studies.
Even as cartoonist twins, both of you must have different styles and techniques to follow. Tell us who does what.
Of course we have different styles of drawing. But honestly we never felt the absence of coherence whenever we worked together. We can even complete each other’s unfinished work without changing the concept or the idea of it. Then again, some people might easily spot the difference.
Tell us a bit about how you both got started on the illustration line. We’ve started our career as cartoonists when we were in high school. From that point onwards, people know us as cartoonists. But when we got our first computer, we started doing illustrations. In 2006 we joined iStock and started making vector graphics. Right now we have over 3000 projects with over 90000 downloads, and a very few of those illustrations are cartoons.
Tell us a bit about the projects you both carried out as a team.
We both work for iStock and Getty images, and those works got published and were used by many top brands and media like Samsung, Microsoft, Huffington post, Time, Forbes and many more. Right now, we’ve started working on some animation projects and just finished an animated TVC. Soon it will be on air. We also worked with Cadbury India for Oreo’s latest campaign “Play with Oreo”.
It seems like Drogo, the dragon is closer to the heart than most of your illustrations. Does he have his own story?
Actually we had no idea our Drogo will be that famous! Drogo got recognised from Instagram, where we used to post random doodles everyday. Once we drew a dragon, it looked so cute and adorable that we thought of doing more doodles. We started loving this dragon and named him Drogo. One day we fooled around with him a bit, poked him with a pencil to see his reaction. Then we started doodling the dragon interacting with real objects and continued posting it almost regularly.
Drogo and some other doodles got featured on many websites like DesignTaxi, BoredPanda, 9gag, Talenthouse and Artpeople to name a few. To our amazement, we are getting huge responses every day. We even got fan arts from Germany, Russia, USA and Vietnam. A fan from Brazil, drew Drogo cartoons on the wall of his kid’s room. What future plans do you have for yourselves? Just recently we’ve started our own company called “Nerd Rabbit”; our aim is to serve the highest possible quality works on design, branding and animation. Beside that we are planning our next animated short film. Currently we’re developing its storyline.