A picture is worth a thousand words. Then what about a picture of words? Shreya KS, a student of fashion designing, has made a hobby of mini-word portraits wherein pen sketches are drawn via artistic rendering of letters in lieu of strokes. The sketches the 22-year-old puts up on her Instagram page #ArtLoverShreyaKS have been winning the hearts of art lovers.
“Since many artists prefer to work on pencil sketches or in water colour, I wanted to try something unique. It just struck me that I could use fonts or letters, like it’s done in calligraphy,” says Shreya, a native of Nemmara, Palakkad.
She first experimented with the idea after being inspired by a first-look poster of Odiyan , sketching a portrait of a young-looking Mohanlal with the word ‘odiyan’ in Malayalam. “My friends who saw the work encouraged me to try out more and I started doing word sketches of some of my artist-friends,” says Shreya over phone. Later, much to her surprise, her word portrait of Miya had the actor tagging herself in a social media post. “That was a big surprise. I never had any idea how the sketch even came to the actor’s notice,” says Shreya with a laugh.
The young artist says she, in fact, finds doing word portrait easier than normal pen/pencil sketches, which incorporate shading for visual appeal. “In word sketches, there’s no requirement for shading as the letters themselves fill the space. In a way, it’s writing, in an artistic pattern. I would visualise the larger picture in mind when I begin and so it’s just a matter of curling and fashioning the words to fit into the framework,” explains Shreya. She traces a faint outline first using pencil to maintain symmetry and is comfortable with essaying portraits in both Malayalam and English script. She usually takes a little more than 15 minutes to finish a work.
Shreya, who also loves to do murals, is currently focussing on works of 5x5 inches and 5x8 inches dimensions and is attempting word portraits on smaller canvases. “The idea is to shrink the word size as small as possible. I also do standard pen sketches of 1x1 inch,” she says.
Shreya, who aspires to be an illustrator and eventually get into animation, now plans to try out word portraits in Hindi, which she feels is more challenging due to the nature of the script. Nevertheless, for her, it’s art for heart’s sake.
