The London Underground Sketchbook

Priya Kuriyan opens up her sketchbook from the Tube

Nov 18, 2018 12:00PM EST

Priya Kuriyan is a book illustrator, comic book artist and an animator. She has directed educational films for the Sesame street show (India) and the Children's Film Society of India (CFSI) and illustrated numerous children's books for various Indian publishers. She has contributed to Indian comics anthologies like Pao, This side that side, Eat the sky drink the ocean and First hand 2 (an anthology of non-fiction comics). She was also part of the Indo German collaboration 'Elephant in the room' published by Zubaan books. Her graphic novel 'Indira' is a collaboration with the writer Devapriya Roy. Instagram https://www.instagram.com/priyakuriyan/ comics blog http://kuriyanmakeskomics.tumblr.com/ books and illustrations http://priyakuriyan.blogspot.com/

11/15/18:
Last month I was traveling around England as part of an exchange program + comics residency at the Metal Culture lab in south-end. My fellow travelers were two members/partners at Studio Kokaachi, a small comics publishing house in Kochi, Kerala. At the lab, we developed a collaborative piece that they will be publishing soon. The residency was refreshing, it was an opportunity to share and discuss our processes with other comics creators in the UK. Attending the Thought Bubble festival at Leeds was an added bonus. We took innumerable train rides during the month that we spent in the UK and a lot of these sketches are from those rides. The more realistic ones tend to be from the longer train rides that I took as there was more time an space to bring out my sketchbook and observe passengers as they were snoozing or chatting with their friends. The more cartoonish ones are the ones I drew from memory; mainly by observing people carefully.