Walking A Creative Tightrope

Vishnu Nair balances a day job as graphic designer with a personal illustration practice and still finds time to put paint to canvas!

Where did it all begin?

VN: I used to be the kid in class who could draw your favorite cartoon characters from memory. My humor and sense of storytelling (and escape) was heavily inspired by TV and comics, which amused some and confused most. When I was five, we moved from Kochi to Hyderabad for a year. Despite knowing only Malayalam, I managed to patch together enough English from my cartoon consumption so that I eventually made friends who could understand me. I pursued a BFA degree followed by an M.Des from NID. With my keen interest in the realm of narratives, pop culture and visual art, it was only natural that I would lean towards art, animation, editorial illustration as a place to exercise my craft and ideas.

How do you balance professional commitments with your personal art and illustration practice?

VN: With great difficulty, but it helps that both feed each other. I work as a Graphic Designer with Codesign, a brand identity and communication design studio based in Gurgaon – my work there primarily involves branding and visual identity design projects, and has me engaging with context, perception and craft (among other things) very differently for different projects. If one month it’s a project for well engineered (but expensive) rockets, the next it’s toothpaste for trees in the rural sector. Designing for trees and designing for astronauts use very different parts of my brain.

With illustration I engage with narratives and nuances in a similar, interesting manner. The same design process and attention to craft and research are carried over home whether it’s a children’s picture book with a pumpkin serving slices of itself to camels, or a 2-meter tall digital artwork that illustrates folktales from a mysterious 1st Century Port town.