Illustration · Character Design · Visual Narrative · World Building
Illustrate a children's picture book collecting the essential stories of Ganesha — not a single narrative but a mythology in episodes: his creation from sandalwood paste, his beheading and transformation, his circumambulation of the universe, his taming of the mouse, his humbling of Kubera. A god introduced not as symbol but as character.
Ganesha is one of the most illustrated deities in the world — which is precisely the problem. The iconography is so established, so repeated across calendars and car dashboards and temple walls, that it has become almost invisible. Familiarity has smoothed away the strangeness. A child encountering these images should encounter something stranger and more alive than what they already know.
The book presents the challenge not of depicting Ganesha but of reintroducing him — as a character with a mother who loved him fiercely, a father who didn't recognise him, a mouse he had to subdue, a feast he couldn't stop eating. A god with a history, and feelings about it.
The book presents the challenge not of depicting Ganesha but of reintroducing him — as a character with a mother who loved him fiercely, a father who didn't recognise him, a mouse he had to subdue, a feast he couldn't stop eating. A god with a history, and feelings about it.
The challenge was not to illustrate a god. It was to introduce a character — one a child might argue with, laugh at, and recognise.
Ganesha's stories are, at their core, stories about the costs and gifts of being made the way you are — an elephant head on a boy's body, a destroyer of obstacles who is also an eater of sweets, a deity whose power was assembled from grief and accident and a mother's refusal to accept loss. These images try to hold all of that at once, and make it feel, for a child, like an inheritance rather than a lesson.
Project: Ganesha: Stories of the Elephant God • Studio: Studio Apara • Scope: Full Book Illustration • Children's Picture Book
