Suhita Shirodkar, an illustrator and teacher, believes her sketchbook is what a camera is to a photographer. It accompanies Shirodkar everywhere, along with a set of Prismacolor pencils and watercolor paints, recording her travel experiences, “especially the ephemeral ones”.
For most people, travelling is the easiest way to recharge – getting away from home port offers new experiences, conversations and views. But for many young Indian artists like Shirodkar, it’s that and much more – it’s the inspiration that fires their imagination and forms the theme of their work.
Scroll.in spoke to some of these artists, for whom “travel essentials” imply their favorite sketchbooks and stationery.
Abhijit Kalan’s Minimal Landscapes
For illustrator and nature photographer Abhijit Kalan, his poetic minimal landscapes are a mix of his travels and dreams. He enjoys travelling to non-touristy places and clicking photographs for his image bank, especially of water bodies and seascapes. On returning to his studio, he converts these to simple but stunning artworks.
Speaking about this process, Mumbai-based Kalan said, “My journeys are never planned. Finding raw, undiscovered places is what attracts me. While creating my landscapes, the photographs are only there to remind me what I was thinking of at that particular moment. I dream a lot, and often see landscapes in my dreams. These landscapes are my memories. Each artwork is a tiny step in helping me learning different things.”
Sameer Kulavoor’s The Ghoda Cycle Project
Mumbai-based illustrator Sameer Kulavoor’s unique The Ghoda Cycle Project is an illustrated documentation of the cycle, and how culture, society, economy intersect on cycles across rural and urban India. Cycles are mobile shops – selling tea, vegetables, flowers, ice creams and more – and carry everything from cooking gas, milk, bread, newspapers to tiffins. “The drawings were not done while travelling, they were more like a post mortem done later in my studio. The Ghoda cycles were a subject I had been observing for a while and decided to put together as an individual project.”
Kulavoor points out that the sketches made on his recent travels to Kochi, New York and South East Asia are, however, drawn on location. Drawing and painting while travelling is a completely different experience for him. “It’s basically removing yourself from a familiar territory and exposing yourself to the new and unknown,” he said. “It has a huge impact on me and how I work, draw and paint. I’m sensitive to surroundings in general, so wherever I go and work, it’s like starting fresh.”
Siddharth Dasari’s Indian Locomotives
Designer Siddharth Dasari is constantly looking for ways to share stories. Thus emerged the project Indian locomotives, where an encounter with a retired locomotive designer of the Indian Railways – his grandfather’s colleague – led him to capture the trains of India in a colourful illustrated series. “He was proudly talking about the locomotives he designed and how, even today, they are helping bring people closer to each other,” Dasari said. “I decide to showcase these unsung heroes of travel in India through illustrations. So I went to the railway station the next day, clicked some photographs and used them as references to draw them digitally.”
Sachin Karle’s Time and the Way We Travel
Sachin Karle’s sketches employ a mix of real and surreal to find an expression of “how time and our mode of travel are so intricately interwoven”. He sent his sketchbook Time and the Way We Travel as a submission to the Sketchbook Project, which aims to create the largest collection of crowd-sourced sketchbooks from artists across the globe. It was received well.
The submission was a serious project, and Karle would spend every Saturday on it. “I’d make notes, create rough thumbnails, and then fine-tune the sketches.” While Karle confessed that he rarely travels for pleasure anymore, let alone carry a sketchbook everywhere, his phone has become his camera. “I don’t sit at each place and sketch. But it’s registered in my mind the way I experienced it. It’s not always exact but I take nuances from the place – a mailbox, light source, words – and capture them in my work.”
Kanika Sethi’s Faces of India
One of the most visually compelling series, Kanika Sethi’s Faces of India represents the tribes of India – from the Paraja and Gadaba tribes of Odisha to the Ladakhi tribes of Drokpa and Lamayury to Chhattisgarh’s Gond tribals. Sethi travels and photographs people, asking fellow travellers for help when she needs a translator. Speaking about her inspiration, she said, “I wanted these illustrations to look very graphic, simple and bold. Indian tribes have a very rich and colourful heritage, hence colour became a very important aspect of this series.” The series being a work-in-progress, but Kanika hopes to capture all the Indian tribes, and eventually move on to illustrating tribes around the world.
Taxi Fabric: India’s art gallery on wheels
Taxi Fabric, started by Mumbai-based entrepreneur Sanket Avlani, provides Indian designers with the unique canvas of taxi seats and ceilings to showcase their work. The process was simple enough – based on a theme, the artists made illustrations, which were then printed onto fabric. The upholstery and seat covers were then stitched, and these were finally fitted on to the taxi. The project lets everybody experience a little piece of India as they drive around Mumbai.
Neethi’s MP Tourism GIFs
Illustrated Madhya Pradesh project was a collaboration between Yahoo, Tumblr and the state’s tourism department. “It doesn’t get better than travelling and drawing, so in many ways this was a dream come true,” said Neethi, one of the Bengaluru-based illustrators for the project. “I spent seven days in Gwalior, Datia, Chanderi and places around, just discovering stories. I felt like I was almost interacting with history. That is exactly what I wanted my readers to feel, and why I presented the series in the form of GIFs.”
“The stories definitely struck a chord with the audience, which reaffirms my belief in breaking formats,” she added. “It’s great to see how receptive people are to new and inventive forms of story telling, and the Internet has proved to be a great medium for that.”
Suhita Shirodkar’s on location sketches
Suhita Shirodkar is an urban sketcher, a global community of artists who practice on-location drawing. Wherever she travels, she takes along her sketchbook and stationery. “Travel is a way to not only see new places, but to see the world afresh, even everyday and ordinary things,” she said. “What’s really essential to my process of capturing a sense of place is working on location... One person’s ordinary is another person’s exotic. A piece works for me when I can look back at it months later and be transported back to that place, the smells, the sights, the sounds, the light.”
All images are copyright of the artists.
