Steni Simon By Express News Service KOCHI: Sandhya Swaminathan is a popular name on social media for her pencil portraits. The magic she creates on paper is purely out of her love for art and zeal that dwarfs her hard work. Started as a hobby, Sandhya found her true calling in sketching and is now an expert pencil portrait artist. Sandhya started working at a firm in Bengaluru after completing her engineering from Kumaraguru College of Technology, Coimbatore. Soon, she realised that it wasn’t her cup of tea, so she quit and returned home. “I was in a dilemma as to what to do next after leaving the job. That is when I started sketching as a hobby,” says Sandhya. Based in Ooty, the 25-year-old artist got back to working with the pencil after experimenting with other mediums like charcoal. “A pencil offers a lot of control to the artist unlike watercolours or oil paints,” says Sandhya. Her first ever pencil portrait was that of her brother, Sangeeth. She made it as a gift for his birthday. “The first one turned out pretty well. Soon I started getting commissions, that’s when I decided to sharpen my skills by practising more. Each work requires a lot of concentration as you need to replicate the exact facial expressions and features of your subject,” says Sandhya who has a substantial following on her Instagram page @ Sandhya_Swaminathan. Her first detailed pencil sketch was a portrait of Jack Sparrow of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies which she completed in six hours using 12 different shades of colour pencils. Her subjects are superheroes to actors from both Bollywood and Hollywood. Sandhya says, “I keep challenging myself and strive to achieve perfection in details.” One such work of hers is a five-feet portrait of actor Vijay, done using Pointillism, a technique of painting using dots. Sandhya has been conducting workshops and seminars in Chennai, Coimbatore and Kerala. She was invited by her college management to conduct a workshop. Her next workshop is slated to take place in the city next month where she will introduce the participants with a few basic techniques in sketching and then move on to teach more detailed methods of creating realistic pencil portraits.

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