Drawing delights

BENGALURU : Netizens can’t stop buzzing about Bollywood director Karan Johar’s new work. And no, they aren’t talking about a movie. Winning hearts is his children’s book, The Big Thoughts of little Luv, where the characters are inspired by his twin children, Yash and Roohi. Lending oodles of cuteness to the book are the illustrations, done by Priya Kuriyan.

Just as praise for this book is pouring in, the Bengaluru-based illustrator has worked on another newly-released book too  – Grandparents’ Bag of Stories by Sudha Murty.  This year has been “unexpectedly” busy for her. “Many projects that were in the pipeline are coming out now,” says Kuriyan, who also made sketches for Perumal Murugan’s Poonachi, which released earlier this year, and Jeffrey Archer’s By Royal Appointment, which released in October.

“It was special because I have grown up reading his books. Though I was not directly in touch with him, he did give a go-ahead for most of my sketches.” Having worked on a range of illustrations, Kuriyan finds sketching for children’s books to be trickier. “A child’s taste can change almost every week. It’s difficult to judge what will work with them, and in India, book characters should be diverse,” says the 39-year-old, adding that the choices change with the treatment for each story.

This helps in her judgement. Take, for instance, Grandparents’ Bag of Stories. For Kuriyan, the story felt like it was set in Bengaluru, where families are modern yet traditional, and live with grandparents. “So I incorporated that while creating the characters. The Big Thoughts of Little Luv has a nuclear family and sounded more like being set in Bombay or Delhi,” explains Kuriyan, who is currently in Kerala. 

Kuriyan’s first book was Radhika Chadha’s I’m So Sleepy, which came out in 2003, and is about an elephant who forgets how to sleep. She says there are different processes that go into sketches for commissioned and personal projects. “I visualise the characters first, while the writing follows. I have a good amount of drawing before completing anything else,” says Kuriyan, mentioning that another important difference for personal projects is that you have to keep motivating yourself, while commissioned projects come with a deadline. 

A graduate of National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, Kuriyan has earlier directed educational films for the Sesame Street show (Galli Galli Sim Sim) and also worked on TV commercials. But her tryst with sketching goes way back to her childhood. “I was not academically inclined, so my parents told me I might as well do something I love,” she laughs.

While her commercial works are available for the world to see, what does her personal sketchbook look like? “I love observing the lives of people around me, along with nature. It’s like drawing without using much of your brain cells,” says Kuriyan, whose next work is a book for Eklavya, an NGO in Bhopal, which is coming out by December-end.