Just out of a relationship and moving thousands of miles away from his friends that he made during his undergrad years at Syracuse University in Upstate New York, Sai Prateek Narayan’s life was on a downward spiral.
“After graduating with my bachelors in architecture from Syracuse University, New York, I was experiencing an emotional low due to a few drastic changes taking place in my life,” says Mumbai-based Prateek, who currently works as a junior architect at Architect Hafeez Contractor.
After moving from the United States back to Oman and then India, Prateek admits that the only solution his friends had for his depressed state was to draw it out. “Literally draw my feelings,” explains Prateek, who moved to Mumbai in August last year.
So, with the help of a tablet computer, the 23-year-old started adding vibrant colours and sometimes messages to selfies that people would send him.
“If you go to the earlier drawings on my Facebook page, RevealArt, you will find that they are dark and convey a lot of emotion. The drawing started off as a stress buster and it soon helped with my mood and with the change in mood, the drawings changed too,” he adds.
And sure enough, the change snowballed into something this big.
“I’m surprised how much this Snapchat series blew up. It’s not always that your work gets appreciated on such a large scale,” says Prateek, who usually takes 15-20 minutes to work on a drawing, but “with the amount of work I’ve been pretty busy with, it’s getting tougher to do”.
