Artists’ Sketchbooks 01: Anand RK

Anand’s sketchbook is a visual delight; he works in multiple mediums and styles, tied together by his impeccable attention to detail. His portfolio boasts of intricate character studies and digital illustration and his work has an almost surreal, fantasy-like feel to it.

Who

Anand Radhakrishnan is a freelance illustrator from Mumbai. He graduated with a BFA in Applied Art from JJ in 2011, followed with a couple of years studying illustration at The Art Department (TAD.) He’s been working out of his home studio since then.

Tell us a little about your work and artistic practice.

Although I don’t strictly do any one kind of work, I like to think that most of my work is narrative. I take up projects depending how much they interest me and currently that happens to be comics and book covers in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy genres.

What does your sketchbook mean to you?

That’s a tough one; I don’t think I ever really thought about it. I’ve maintained sketchbooks since I started drawing seriously but my sketchbook habits and content has changed – during college it was studies of photographs and anatomy drawings and now its more a reflection of my everyday life. I maintain a minimum of 3 sketchbooks at a time and they all have different functions – one for ink drawings in a technique I want to explore, one I carry around to record instances and one for my roughs for illustration jobs.

What my sketchbook means to me is not something that is ever going to be constant and is an idea that has changed and will keep evolving with time. At the moment though, it’s a place where I observe and record the world around me. For me, the idea of capturing a moment in time and making it potentially eternal is very exciting. I carry my sketchbook everywhere so there is never a dull moment and I pull it out whenever I start to get bored, even if it’s in the middle of a wedding reception party. I think in many ways I like my sketchbook spreads to be experiences and not just pretty drawings of people.

Could you share one piece from your sketchbook that means something to you. Please share an image and tell us a little about why you’ve chosen it.

As I mentioned, I like to keep 3-4 sketchbooks at a time so I’d like to share a page each from them to give you a rough idea of what I mean.

24- (from the life drawing sketchbook)

I always carry my sketchbook on trips to the hospital, whether for myself or for an ailing relative. There is something about hospitals that makes it irresistible for me to draw and want to record what I see.

This is from the time my grandmother was recovering from a diabetic episode.

3f - (from an ink drawing series)

Exploring a drawing technique for a personal project where I bring together 2 polar ways of drawing - one being cross-hatching with a thin tip and the other line drawing with thin-thick lines.

8RK - (from a series of painted pages)

Sometime last year I spent some time experimenting with acrylic on toned/black sketchbooks and it gave birth to this series. I have continued to use acrylic, taking lessons from this series for some of my commissioned projects since then.