Wildlife in a City Pond – Sangeeta Kadur’s Work on JLRexplore
10 years ago
When JLRexplore completed a year in existence, they celebrated by featuring 5 artists and their wildlife/nature related works. Sangeeta Kadur – illustrator of our book ‘Wildlife in a City Pond‘ – gave readers into the making of the book.
Via JLRexplore
Thanks to all the wetland bird watching trips, nature walks, wetland projects and lake surveys I have been a part of over the past few years, a fondness to wetlands has grown on me. It was in October 2013 when a phone conversation with Mala Kumar, the editor of Pratham Books, sprang an unexpected discussion about a children’s storybook that involved three of my favourite elements – rain, lakes and wildlife! However, I had never worked on a children’s storybook illustration ever before. Bundled with a lot of apprehension, anxiety, excitement and eagerness, I decided to wake up to the new challenge that was thrown my way. I was more than happy to be illustrating a story authored by Ashish Kothari, who is well known amongst the environment and conservation circles, and is the reason behind ‘Kalpavriksh’, an environmental group in Pune.
Soon, the story was followed up with a pagination, which helped me compose each page with the required story elements. The author, Ashish Kothari, beautifully narrates in the story, his move into a new home in Pune; a little pond that his balcony overlooked and the exciting transformation the monsoons bought in along with the incredible variety of birdlife, insects, amphibians, mammals and reptiles that began to inhabit the little ecosystem. He continues to talk about how the lake was suddenly threatened by urban development, and how people from the neighbourhood came together to save that mini-sanctuary.
I started work with key sketches for each of the pages and a couple of coloured plates to decide the style; soon there was a go ahead. Juggling with another project at hand, I probably took about two whole months to finish all the 15 page illustrations for the book. The artworks were couriered off to Delhi to scan. The text was inlayed within the art and in a few weeks, the .pdf version of the book was shared for final edits. At the same time, translations in five other languages – Kannada, Hindi, Marathi, Telugu and Urdu were underway.
Finally, in August 2014, the book ‘Wildlife in a City Pond’ was added to the Pratham online library. I am happy to mention that this storybook falls under the Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA 4.0), and will soon be available for free download!
Hop over to the JLRexplore page to view more of Sangeeta’s work.
