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

Accidental Images

While doing my second picture book, it was fun when all the bits and pieces that made up a picture got jumbled up on my desk and created their own interesting images. Here are a couple of them that I could find on my laptop.

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.

An Essay About Beauty, Line and the Body

 

Please read this excellent essay about the language of lines written by Carol Blaizy D'Souza.

I am honored that it features so much of my work. 

Read the essay HERE

"In the pastel drawings that serve as illustrations for the book, Sebastian uses colour, light and shadow to such great effect that one is moved beyond words at the tenderness a body can evoke. In one illustration where a young girl’s bare body is depicted—only her right breast, its mauve nipple and parts of her right palm lit, the rest of her body in shadow, a suggestion—the command the artist exerts on her craft is fully evident."

From the Exhibition Catalogue

 

I chanced on the pages from the exhibition catalogue while searching for something on my computer, so I thought I'd post it here.

The exhibition in question, BECOMING, was a celebration of 130 years of Indian illustrators held at India International Centre, in New Delhi, last year.

IBBY Honours List

 

So my second picture book MOMMIES has been selected for the IBBY Honours List. 

Sometime earlier, my publisher called and we had a conversation that went something like this -

R: Priya, congratulations, MOMMIES has been selected for the IBBY Honours List and you are the only illustrator from India whose book has been selected in the Illustration category!

Me: Oh, okay

R: (mildly exasperated) Priya, do you even know what IBBY is?
Me: Well, I've seen the name here and there.
R: (incredulous) Priya, can you Google and read what IBBY is all about? It is such an honour to be selected for this!

So I did Google and read up about IBBY. I've learnt that it stands for the International Board of Books for Young People. Apparently it is a very coveted honour to have one's book selected in the categories of Writer, Translator and Illustrator, not to mention the only one to be selected in a particular category.

This book MOMMIES has won several awards and honours:

FICCI Award for best picture book 2024

Publishing Next award for best picture book 2025
DPictus 100 Outstanding Picturebooks for 2024 and 2025

Parag Honours List 2025

and now this, India's selection for illustration for the IBBY Honours List.

Twenty years ago, when I first bought my apartment, created a studio and began working seriously and consistently on my art, if I had ever been told that I would illustrate two books, one published by Seagull Books (an award in itself), and chosen to be published by them solely because of the quality of my illustrations, I thought it would have ended there. That was enough of an achievement for me to end my professional life with. However, I made a second book, and it was the recipient of DPictus 100 Best twice and much to my surprise, an IBBY Honours list. 

Twenty years ago, after the deaths of my parents, I was pretty much written off by extended family, community and society as that oddball woman doing that illustration stuff, whatever it was, instead of getting married. Ten years ago when I returned from Montreal, most of the people I was acquainted with expected me to end up as a kind of paraplegic, someone to be commiserated with and entirely dismissed. So, in retrospect, it seems to me that if there is one other thing that is as immensely satisfying as having these two books on my bookshelf,  it has been in proving my naysayers wrong. 

I am reminded of this poem that I came across by The Fallen Poet -

What a privilege it is to be overwhelmed by a life I once prayed for.

What a privilege it is to become a version of myself I once thought was impossible.

What a privilege it is to still believe in good things.

What a privilege it is to grow into someone I used to need.

What a privilege it is to become softer in a world that tried to harden me.

What a privilege it is to no longer beg for love that should have been freely given.

What a privilege it is to finally be proud of the person I'm becoming.

If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next - if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions - you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone ever again. You'd never dare to.

~ Margaret Atwood.

AN EXHIBITION

 

Sometime in April 2025, Richa Jha, publisher, Pickle Yolk Books , curated a massive exhibition of Indian Children's Illustrators at India International Centre in Delhi. This exhibition, titled BECOMING, was created to celebrate 130 years of Indian illustration. What was so joyful and heartening to me was that my first book Is It The Same For You?  written by Neha Singh, illustrated by me, Priya Sebastian, and published by Seagull Books, got the much overdue attention it deserved, a kind of resurrection after getting published just before the pandemic in 2020 after which the world came to a standstill. Illustrations from this book were blown up into huge installation pages and placed in the centre of the exhibition resulting in a renewed interest in the book.

Here is Richa talking about this book. Her wonderful words about my illustrations truly warms my heart.

Also, Archana Atri, editor at Pickle Yolk Books, talks so movingly about how much she loved the illustrations in my book in her post on her Instagram account over here -  >>>LINK

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When I was around 5 years old and in Class 1 at school, it was Open Day, when classes were decorated nicely and people came to see what the students had put on display. When I climbed up the steps to enter my class, several of my classmates rushed up to me, “Priya! 3 boards full of your drawings have been displayed in class!” And indeed, when I walked towards my classroom, right at the entrance, I saw 3 boards full of my drawings pinned up on them. The teacher had taken the drawings from my drawing books and pinned them up for all to see.

I’ve tried to remember how I felt back then. What I do recall was that I was rather confused at the excitement of my classmates around me. I remember being somewhat surprised that their drawings had been grouped together on a couple of other boards, while my drawings had 3 boards all to themselves. I had no idea why. Drawing was simply something that I did spontaneously and naturally, like eating or sleeping.

Now, so many years later, there seems to be a repetition of what happened long ago when my publisher decided to blow-up my work giant-size for the exhibition of illustrators and eulogized my work with so much enthusiasm. I am happy.

Had I been in my 20s or 30s and received such attention for my work, I'd have probably thought it undeserved and retreated into my shell and showed off some kind of mock bravado in public. Now, in my 50s, seeing this still fills me with a sense of disbelief and it took me several months to process and make a post here. 

Everything happens at the right time. This is a good way to end over 2 decades of my vocation as an illustrator. Many, many thanks to Richa both for this unique exhibition of illustrators and for highlighting my work in this manner.

Photographs by Archana Atri (editor Pickle Yolk Books)

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"The trouble with metrics, I’ve learned, is they have the habit of collapsing right when we’ve got them where we want them. You get a promotion: AI wipes out your sector. Buy a house: the market collapses. Find the love of your life: they find theirs. As the old Yiddish proverb goes, ‘We plan, God laughs’."

~ Rajeev Balasubramanian

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