Illustration • Character Design • Visual Narrative
A full set of illustrations for a children's introduction to the Hanuman Chalisa — forty verses of devotional poetry addressed to Hanuman, one of the most beloved figures in the Hindu pantheon — that would make the text feel joyful, immediate, and alive to a young reader encountering it for the first time.
The Hanuman Chalisa is not a story in the conventional sense. It is a poem of praise — cumulative, devotional, formally repetitive. The challenge was not narrative but atmospheric: how do you sustain visual energy and emotional warmth across forty verses without reducing a complex and beloved deity to a single fixed image of himself? The answer was to treat Hanuman not as an icon to be depicted but as a presence to be felt — joyful, enormous, tender, and occasionally frightening in the way that great love can be frightening.
The visual language draws on the tradition of Indian classical painting — the swirling cloud formations, the layered atmospheric depth, the treatment of divinity as something that fills a frame rather than occupying a corner of it — while staying warm and accessible enough for a child to enter without preparation. Movement was the central formal concern. Every spread needed to feel like it was in the middle of something: mid-flight, mid-transformation, mid-devotion. Hanuman is never at rest in these images. Neither is the eye.
The brief was to make the sacred feel immediate. Not simplified — immediate. A child should feel the wind of his passing.
The colour palette holds the tension between the celestial and the earthly — deep teals and indigos for the sky and cosmos, warm golds and saffrons for the sacred, soft pinks and creams for the human figures caught up in something larger than themselves. The gold line-work, drawn from the convention of Indian manuscript illustration, runs through every spread as a reminder that what we are looking at is both ancient and alive.
The Hanuman Chalisa has been recited by millions of people across centuries. These images are an attempt to make that devotion visible — not to explain it, but to let a child stand inside it for a moment and feel its scale.
Project: My First Hanuman Chalisa • Publisher: Adidev Press Studio: Studio Apara Scope: Full Book Illustration
