Looking back a little, and a lot.

Not quite the end of the year, but I’m taking my end-of-year break from blogging, wrapping up work for a week or two, and looking back a wee bit.

If we have only met like this, on zoom, I hope we get to meet in person in 2022. I loved online teaching through the pandemic and will continue to, but I’m looking forward to in-person teaching again. If you’re signed up for my newsletter you’ll see those workshops announced first. Not signed up yet? Here’s the link.

This was a year to do new stuff. One of the most challenging things I did was write pieces for WIRED magazine as part of my residency with them. There are so many fantastic things I learnt, I’ll have to just write a blogpost about them all, but one of the best parts was the challenge of doing something new. Of having the freedom to be a beginner at something. In fact, I loved that so much, I’ve decided to take up an old love and learn it again, like a beginner.

I loved a pair of hand-me-down red roller skates I had when I was a little kid. And I skated a lot. Yes, even on the super bumpy roads and footpaths (they were never called sidewalks!) in Bombay. So, I bought myself a gorgeous pair of roller skates recently and have discovered that I will need to relearn how to skate. Which sounds a little more daunting than it did when I was seven. But I like the idea. Here are those beautiful skates.

And one of the biggest surprises for me last year continues to be a surprise this year. Last year, Paul Wang and I created a virtual space called Sketching PlayLab as a playground for sketchers, a place where we could orchestrate play sessions in art, based on concepts that are tedious and sometimes too structured when taught in traditional ways. This experiment and its audience kept growing and it’s continued to surprise us. Thousands of individuals have signed up for our sessions through 2020 and 2021, many of them have some to twenty or thirty sessions over time. To say thank you to our Sketching PlayLab family, we held a free online party where we all ate and sketched our food together.

Here’s my breakfast sketch from our party: sabudana khichadi, chai and Parle G biscuits to dip in my chai. The persimmon? It just added a touch of color. I love drawing, but not eating the fruit.

And that wraps up another year of blogging and sharing with you. Thank you for coming along on the ride. Here’s wishing you a happy New Year and I’ll be back posting sketches soon!