A wanderer's diary

The new Bengaluru is given a nostalgic touch with her sketches. The hotspots of the City, including the quaint Koshy’s restaurant, Airlines Hotel, Byappanahalli Metro Station and the very busy lanes of Commercial Street, take on a natural and colourful look through Archana Pereira’s artistic hands.

The entrepreneur behind the six-month-old start-up ‘Ink Trails’, Archana is an architecture student who took the route of an illustrator after her masters degree. “As a student, I developed an interest in sketching through the various case studies we did as part of the course. I went to Scotland for my masters and during this time I explored my travel options. My travels unveiled different cultures, lifestyles and architecture that inspired me to sketch them all down,” recalls Archana. Finishing her course and moving back to the City, she had a series of illustrations sketched out, which she called ‘travel diaries’. The detailed sketches, inspired by her travels, received a lot of appreciation from family and friends, which motivated her to give this artistic passion a business angle. “It is my travel trails, captured on ivory sheets, that inspired me to start ‘Ink Trails’,”  she says.

While her ‘travel diaries’ posted on her Facebook page welcomed art lovers with open arms, her illustration collection of ‘Bangalore series’ received great demand. A participant in the recent Christmas edition of the Sunday Soul Sante, her stall was thronged with art enthusiasts who were eager to grab the creative yet realistic sketches of ‘Namma Bengaluru’. “This was the first time I set up a stall in this flea market and the response was overwhelming. I had no idea about how many illustrations I had to display. However, at the end of the day, most of my works were sold out!” she says with joy. With the City coloured mostly in red, yellow and hues of blue, it was her illustration of the Bengaluru traffic that attracted maximum attention. “People loved the idea of this illustration and could instantly connect with the chock-a-block roads of the City,” she explains.

She is now working on the limited edition of ‘2016 Namma Bengaluru Calendar’, which compiles illustrations of the historic architectures along with the old and popular outlets of the City, coloured meticulously. She says, “I want to do more of the City series and I would like to work on illustrations of other well-known cities too.” Running a successful venture within the City, she hopes to expand her reach and make her artwork available throughout the country.

One can grab her creative illustrations available as prints and coasters, laptop skins and phone cases, on Postergully. For details, one can visit her Facebook page — Ink Trails.