These Are My Friends

I love them! (Some portraits 2016-now)

Not being on Instagram is clearly doing wonders for me because I am back here in your inbox so soon! This newsletter is me cheating (or recycling, depending on who’s spinning it) because I’m sharing with you a bunch of older drawings. A good friend’s birthday is today and we have a long-standing tradition of drawing each other on our birthdays (I am obsessed with a good long-standing tradition). (Those portraits are not included here because I want to show you both sets all together!)

I used to draw my friends a lot, not so much for the “OMG you drew me” reaction (because my friends are not those people) but because they were part of my everyday day and I used to be a little better at incorporating drawing into my everyday! I’m a little more pressed for time these days but I’m trying REALLY hard in periods where things are slow, to go back to making drawings for people/things/events/occasions in my everyday. (Book Club pals I will resume the book paintings next time!)

Here are some drawings of my friends over the years! Some of these are very old and quite terrible. I rarely share older work because to do that, I would have to look at older work. *shudder*. They go from newest first and then older ones towards the bottom not quite in perfect chronological order.

This is a little portrait of my friend Aashi (promise I’m friends with people who don’t have pink hair also) who I find very difficult to draw. She regularly accuses me of never having drawn her so this will serve as evidence that will get me off the hook forever. :

A portrait of my aunt

Priya Ramani

that I drew to commemorate her being cleared of the defamation charge leveled against her by the man she accused of sexual harassment. She is currently using the drawing as her insta dp :)

This one is a pandemic project that I quickly abandoned when I realized lockdown was not going to be just 3 strange weeks in an otherwise normal year. I drew my friends every time they Facetimed me (from screenshots, I’m not here making people sit still on Facetime while I draw them) . I don’t know if I did the best job preserving these drawings (no fixative in lockdown!) but they really serve as a little time capsule for me. These are my favourite ones:

Okay, this is a funny one. This was my Instagram soft launch for Shantanu, my boyfriend, when we first started dating. I don’t think we had any half-decent pictures together (maybe just one little selfie photoshoot’s worth) before we had to go back to our homes in different cities for the pandemic so my options were to make something up or post a Facetime screenshot because that was the format our relationship took for the first year or so. This is us looking at a Chloe Wise painting.

Saakshi has always been my concert buddy, even once she moved an ocean away from me (we are seeing Fall Out Boy this November together!). She introduced me to the wild idea of making a playlist to study up on the band’s hits and sometimes entire discography so that you can sing along at the show. One of my favourite feelings is when a band plays a deepcut that you recognize just by the opening notes! Everyone pray that they play my favourites in November.

I would not have survived college without Brittany. We were the exact same level of unhinged and without the year and 2 months that we were roommates, I probably would have left New York immediately after college, never seen My Chemical Romance live, never frequented my favourite bar or got my favourite tattoo, Brittany is also a brilliant photographer! This is her watching Whisper of the Heart with me

This is Janine! Drawn by pre-art school post emo phase Tara. The picture I used as a reference is still one of my favourite pictures of Janine. I did not know at the time that she was really mad at me on this trip. hehe. Janine is one of my oldest friends and contrary to what she might think I have many silly drawings of her (including one of her future wedding dress that I had no business trying to envision).

Anshika is probably my most frequent subject. We’ve been friends for so long and so much of that time was spent drawing together that it was inevitable! I have many little comics and even a small strange paintings of her inserted into her favourite movie scene (its bizarrely cringe or I would have shown you) but this painting of her drinking tea on her balcony in Bombay is my favourite!

This painting is very funny to me because Saakshi and Anoushka are standing directly in front of the heater in my dorm room, drying their wet pants because we got caught in the snow.

This terrible painting of Deena having breakfast at Kala Ghoda Cafe has her face blotched out in the most disgusting vomit grey because I can NEVER get her face right. I’ve only managed once and it is in the drawing directly below. I included the painting for the energy and the drawing for the face. Together they’re a portrait of Deena.

A fittingly artsy/pretentious “portrait” of jehan (taken from a picture they took so I don’t know how much credit I deserve.

I’m ending with a portrait of my oldest friend Tara (yes, that is why we became friends). It’s not very good but it captures a really nice trip we took to Goa.

Hoping to be back with a set of portraits of all the friends I’ve made in the last couple of years! Part 2!! Believe me, I have more cringy old portraits of friends, people I don’t even speak to anymore, family members, my own dog and dogs and cats who are my friends.