#chaaya prabhat

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Chaaya Prabhat's illustrated book cover for Maya Prasad's Drizzle, Dreams, and Lovestruck Things.

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Feature artist Friday

Hey, this is my second Feature artist Friday, a little series I’m currently doing as an art student to spread the work of some indie/contemporary minority artists (like myself) and to make art and engaging with work of minority artists more accessible to the general public. I am white British and obviously not a member of every minority that I will be covering so if I get things wrong, especially in regards to ethnicity, please feel free to correct me and edits will be made to the post. 

Todays artist isssss…

CHAAYA PRABHAT

This Friday we’re looking at a Freelance graphic designer from India, Chaaya Prabhat (She/her). She is an illustrator (someone who draws pictures to go along with writing, like the people who draw pictures in books) and lettering artist (Someone who does designs with letters, like making fonts, making the words in logos, and including words/letters in their drawings). 

Originally from Chennai (in India), Chaaya now lives in and works from Goa (also in India), She’s illustrated book covers for publishers including Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Hachette, Macmillan, and Disney Hyperion (These are some big names in publishing!!) She’s also worked with Snapchat, Facebook and Google on digital illustration projects which is insane! The majority of her work is digital, but there are some sketchbook style works on her website which I think are amazing!

I mean just look at this graphic pen and marker drawing of housing areas! They’re absolutely stunning with the drawings themselves being achromatic (no colour), which makes the whole thing simple and easy to understand, but includes a small amount of colour by highlighting the negative space (area that isn’t the stuff, eg the background) in red, which adds to the readability of the shapes. 

Chaaya herself, in an interview, has said that her use of colours and shapes is inspired by the colourful areas where she grew up, in Chennai.  She says that “There is so much colour in India—I see these colourful places around me and I draw the world that way.” You can see this inspiration in the picture above, with its focus on bright primary (red, yellow, blue) colours and architecture. 

These are two of the book covers she has designed, both for books written by Geroge Orwell. Animal Farm is one of my personal favourite books, and 1984 is a book I am currently studying for an english course, so these illustrations particularly interest me. The Animal Farm book cover uses a limited, analogous (colours that are next to each other in the rainbow) colour palette of reds, oranges and creamy-yellows and browns. This use of colour means that the entire cover looks cohesive, and the red may be symbolic of the bloodshed in the book. With the 1984 cover, she uses similar reds and oranges, but also includes dark blues, which form a complimentary (colours that are opposite each other on the colour wheel) colour scheme, which means that the orange shape in the centre, and the surveillance cameras around the outside, stand out more from the blue. There is a lot of eye symbolism in the cover, with not only the obvious eyes, but with the central window shape making the shape of an eye, with the sun as its pupil, suggesting that the whole world is watching, which is the key theme of the book. 

One of my favourite pieces of her work is her illustrations for the poem Ozymandias, which was written all the way back in 1818 by Percy Bysshe Shelly (Mary Shelly’s husband). The image I’ve attached is one from the end of the poem but it is, however, my favourite, due to the sideways tilted landscape, that makes it feel like the viewer is lying on their side to meet the statue face-to-face. This one also uses complementary colours, with the greens and blues of the mask being opposite to the oranges and yellows of the landscape.

You can check out Chaaya’s website here, her Instagram here, and some of the books she’s illustrated here, here and here

Find out more about Indian architecture here (wikipedia page here)

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Reader's Digest - The Hole in The Fence by Chaaya Prabhat / Bēhance

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Animal Tales From India by Nikita Gill,  illustrated by Chaaya Prabhat

Animal Tales From India: Ten Stories from the Panchatantra by Nikita Gill,  illustrated by Chaaya Prabhat. Nosy Crow, c2023, 2024. 9798887770642 Rating: 1-5 (5 is an excellent or a Starred review) 4.5 Format: Hardcover picture book Genre: Folktales What did you like about the book?  Using a conversational tone, Nikita Gill (an Irish-Indian poet and playwright) opens this collection with…

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From 'The Culture Of Clothes' by Giovanna Alessio, artwork by Chaaya Prabhat.

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The Things You Own End Up Owning You

Art by Chaaya Prabhat || IG

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Chaaya Prabhat

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Blog Tour ANNI DREAMS OF BIRYANI

Blog Tour ANNI DREAMS OF BIRYANI @namstwit @amazonpub @barbfisch @blueslipper

A little girl living in her neighborhood’s “Little India” loves her neighborhood cafe’s biryani, made by the curmudgeonly chef everyone calls “Uncle”. Anni’s family has biryani as a special treat on Fridays, but Anni wishes she could make delicious biryani like Uncle’s; then she could make it every day! Determined to learn how Uncle makes his biryani, Anni sits at Uncle’s cafe with a notepad and…

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C is for Chameleon - 36 Days of Type - 2017 by Chaaya Prabhat - Graphic Arts

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Designed by Chaaya Prabhat for Strawberry Fields featuring The Derelicts, Your Chin, Little Coffee in your Sugar, Black Letters and Inner Sanctum at National Law School of India University, Bangalore in January 2019.

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Chaaya Prabhat’s illustrated book cover for Varsha Bajaj’s Thirst.

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Hello! http://ift.tt/2mHByGd

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Thai Dancer - Character Design Challenge by selected artists: Lorenzo Colangeli, Ilya Viryachev, Ewelina Brzezińska, Chaaya Prabhat, Caroline Leibel

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Chaaya Prabhat

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Art by  Chaaya Prabhat

February’s Theme: #ThaiDancer

Presented by CDQ Magazine

Discover the artists of the Character Design Challenge community and the current Theme of the Month in our Facebook Group! And when you repost your design on our Patreon page, you can also win awesome prizes every month and choose the future themes!

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