Hairs

 

One morning, as I crossed the road and headed towards the coffee van in front of Lalbagh West Gate, the Coffee Man had already spotted me and had my order ready: "Darku, lessu", he declared and handed me my glass. Dark coffee, less sugar.
There was this woman who was his assistant who looked at me and said, "Nice hairs" at my new haircut. That is when I noticed her long black plait and complimented her for it. She told me that she regularly gave her hair for c@ncer patients who needed wigs. Here is a photo of her gorgeous plait. That is the coffee man beside her who had my order ready.

I might not have a plait, but I can draw one. This image below is some mucking around I did at my desk with the bits and pieces for one of the Mommies from my book, the hairy one.

It is so nice to get back to blogging. It is like keeping a diary and I didn't realize how much I missed this ritual.

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Priya Sebastian
#priyasebastian

Mahalakshmi Tiffin Room

 

Whoever thought up the interiors and colour schemes of Mahalakshmi Tiffin Room on DV Gundappa Road, should be given a prize. They really knew what they were doing.

I thank serendipity for sending this lovely poser in his bright blue shirt to sit down in front of me. It was the plum on top of the pudding. So perfect for this picture below.

Sketching in Gandhi Bazar

 

This drawing was done outside of the famous Bull Temple. It is a fairly short drive from my home in Central Bangalore. Back in the day, it used to be a big event for my parents to venture out of their Cantonment (Christian) enclave into this side of town, usually to show this area to foreigners. They would enlist the help of one Mr.Raju, one of their few Hindu friends and he would come with a taxi into which the bulky white people would be bundled in to go see a temple and be fed with idlis. Back then, I never thought there would come a time when I would know this area like the back of my hand. I love this side of Bangalore. It has the best sketchable spots, strongest filter coffee, softest idlis and freshest vegetables. And always, speaking fluent Kannada gets me extra best service and instant friends.

During this sketching visit, I espied a boy wearing a colourful shirt sitting on a wall and I took his photograph. 

Later on a subsequent sketching visit, I spotted the same boy wearing the same shirt, but he was holding a baby on his lap, an unusual sight for a young lad in this country. I asked him to pose for me and he did so. (His parents were selling vegetables in their cart nearby). I love the smile on his face in the photo. He stayed like this all through my drawing.

And this is the drawing of him, done live, on the spot.

However, I still wanted to draw his colourful shirt, so I went home and drew him from the photograph. Here it is below -

I think the tender expression on the live sketch captures the essence of the scene better, but I got what I wanted in both the drawings.

I also sat by the traffic lights and sketched this flower seller below. 

As I was drawing this woman, a frail white-haired lady, who must have been at least in her seventies, came up to me and said, "You are keeping yourself busy at your age, that is very good! It is so nice to see you taking such an interest in your hobby!" I smiled. Then I looked up to see her go up to a sleeping cow and touch the cow's tail to her forehead and carry on.

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Priya Sebastian
#priyasebastian

Snippets from my Dreams

 

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Priya Sebastian
#priyasebastian

Lalbagh at Dusk

 

That's Lalbagh (the botanical garden) at dusk when it turns into this mysterious haunting dreamscape.

I dare anyone to tell me which camera I am using. There is a world of difference between even the best iPhones and a decent powerful camera.

Kashmiri Women

 

This was a rush job for a newspaper. I would have like to fine-tune it further, but the deadline was very tight so that I had to get up early, photograph it and email it immediately.

After I did my first picture-book about a Kashmiri girl, I got several jobs associated with Kashmir or involving women wearing headscarves. Because of this, I sometimes get a neighbourhood woman to model for me by wrapping a bedsheet over her head and shoulders. In this picture, the group of women are startled at something, I forget what, so I made my model pose for every one of them. In the figures of the two women in the foreground, one is applying henna on the hands of the other.

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priya sebastian, the hindu

Purple Cabbage

 

I had long wanted to draw a purple cabbage in black and white. Here it is. 

One day soon, I must attempt this in colour too.

Here below is a drawing of a silk-cotton flower bud, the one at the entrance of the West Gate at Lalbagh. The blossoms are deep red, but the chunky flower buds are pink and they are interesting to draw.

Trunk

 

I've drawn this Silk Cotton tree in Lalbagh several times over the years, but the one above is the first one that I have attempted in colour. I like the way the curve of the huge tree-trunk dwarfs the earthy little red structure below it. Also, I read somewhere that the trunk of this tree isn't actually the trunk but the roots that have grown up above the ground. It's a bit hard to fathom. I'll have to read up further.

Here below are some of the black and white studies I made sitting in front of the tree. No sketchbook is large enough for me to do justice to the gorgeous textures on the trunk.
If you didn't know this drawing was one of a giant tree-trunk, you would only see it as a textured abstract drawing.

There is never any space left in my sketchbook for the branches of the tree, so someday I will have to take out a large sheet of paper and draw as much of the tree as possible on my desk. Given the mess that drawing with charcoal entails, that would probably be the better option.

 

Here are some flowers that decorated the ground under the tree. They are so pretty. They carpet the ground thickly during the flowering season.

A Return

 

I am back to blogging. I am done with scrolling through stamp-sized images on Instagram. I dread how much it dilutes the reality and essence of interesting images and how much it cannibalizes time. Also, every now and then, a complete stranger will come up to me and ask me, "Are you Priya Sebastian? I have been reading your blog for ages!" That is yet another reason for me to return once more to this blog and renew my ritual here. In the next few posts, I might put up some of my old work which was lost to Instagram and Facebook, in order to have a record of them just for myself. 

In the old posts, I have gone on about life coming to a full-circle and closing a chapter and indeed that is what has happened. I find that the older I get, I cannot take the pressure of deadlines anymore. That anxiety which fueled most of my earlier years and gave me so much pleasure in solving a problem within a limited amount of time now only serves to paralyze and exhaust me. However, I do get much pleasure in drawing for its own sake. I still go out and sketch. Life is good when I do these things. 

So here I am, back again at my old blog. Please drop by and say Hello.

 

We look at the world once in childhood. The rest is memory.
                                                         ~ Louise Gluck

IBBY

 

I've been told that this is the first time that IBBY - International Board of Books for Young People has included countries from the Far East i.e. the non-whitey-whitey countries. So, Parag Reads was asked to send a choice of some of the best picture-books of 2025 from India in the categories of illustration, writing and translation from which IBBY would nominate what they thought was was the best in each category to be featured in the IBBY Honours List . There was a formidable collection of books sent from India for the illustration category created by some of my very talented colleagues, the very best in the land, so I must say I was very surprised to find that my book MOMMIES was the only book to be selected by IBBY in the illustration category from India for the IBBY Honours List.

 I suspect that making it to the IBBY honours list has some prestige associated with it because half my colleagues heartily congratulated me and the other half of my colleagues did not. I commiserate wholly with those who did not. I am not even a part of the Indian Children's book world. I decided to make a children's book during the pandemic in order to give myself something constructive to do and lo and behold, my book makes it to 2 dPictus 100 best nominations and now this IBBY thing, these international mentions which I know so many of my colleagues would trade a kidney for. Had I been in my twenties I would have been elated, but these days, when I don't even care about such things, these accolades have landed on my lap. Also, to rub in this particular nomination further, apart from the fact that I was the only Indian illustrator whose work was chosen by IBBY, this also makes me the first Indian illustrator to get featured in the IBBY Honours list. It looks like there are some post-menopausal women who cannot help themselves. 

I cannot ignore the irony of this ceremony being held in Canada. Many years ago, in despair that I would never have the opportunity to make a beautiful children's book like the kind I had seen in distant lands, I decided to go live in Canada, Montreal, distant enough, in the hopes that through all kinds of permutations and combinations of fate, I would end up making a decent looking picture book, hard bound and nicely printed. It turned out that I had to return to India to make that happen and now, this year, the ceremony gets held in Ottawa, just a little off the mark from Montreal. 

Do these nominations change one's life? Given how stodgy and tight-arsed international publishers tend to be towards non-white illustrators (they probably barely consider us human), they are hardly going to come knocking at my door asking me to illustrate anything for them just because I made it to the IBBY Honours list. And Indian publishers? From what I have seen, it is the same old tired pillars of the children's book world (writers who know nothing about what constitutes good illustration), constantly exploiting illustrators with their sad justifications of rate card and budget coupled with puerile stories, bad printing and plenty of passive aggression. At the IBBY ceremony in Ottawa, I am told that the illustrators will be given a "diploma". Pray, what am I to do with a diploma? Fan myself from the fumes of the wildfires?  If I had been given a cash prize large bottle of Maple syrup, that would have frankly made me far happier.

So yes, back to the IBBY thing, it won't actually change anything for me like bringing me interesting work and adequate resources to do such work if any, so I am not quite sure what the elation on social media is all about. I have deactivated my Instagram accounts and frankly my life is so much the better for it.