Drawing The Fine Lines Of Life On Her Sketchbook

Bhubaneswar: Some people write a diary to chronicle their life, some turn to poetry and some others write a book or a travelogue. Seema Misra uses her paintbrush and sketch pencil to showcase her journey.

Her sketchbook and she have been inseparable ever since she was a child. She has practically sketched everything that she has set her eyes on, whether it is the temples or the mundane street life. She has virtually brought to life a parallel universe on her little sketchbook.

“Splashing my emotions on to the canvas comes very naturally to me,” she says.

“As a child, I would sketch everything I came across. It has been nine years since I took it up seriously. It is like meditation to me,” she adds.

In the recently held Crafts Conversation, she used her sketchbook to depict the two days full of art and crafts. Her blog, Lonely Canopy, stores all of her work, including this. The tagline says, “Taking you to a magical, secluded place under a green canopy.”

It was not difficult to turn her passion into a profession, she says. “Of course, breaking the stereotype and going out of the way in a society like ours was not very easy but when you have the drive to follow your dreams, things fall into place,” she says. Some of her first paintings were sold through a colleague who liked her art on Facebook.

She has been working in the communications industry for the past seven years, pursuing art on a freelance basis. “I started showcasing my art at a cafe in Bengaluru, called Art Blend Cafe, and helped them with their aesthetics and social media. Sometimes readers like my travel sketching and articles and translate them into a project,” she says.

Her best travel sketching experience was in Bhutan. “The spirituality of the place, the peace, and joy there filled me with happiness and spilled onto my sketchbook!” Seema says.

I have been able to do all this because of my supportive husband and family, she says.

“One can find inspiration anywhere. I find beauty everywhere – in a tree, on a busy road, the light and the shade, a random temple arch, a boring dull office. Art is just a way of capturing it,” she says.