Some songs stay in your ears. Some start making pictures in your head.
Three illustrations born from three very different songs: Baithi Hai by Amit Trivedi, Bandeh by Indian Ocean, and Beparwaah by Parvaaz.
I wanted to see what would happen if I stopped thinking about the songs as music and started thinking about them as images. The illustrations aren’t attempts to literally depict the songs. They are my own visual responses to the feelings, atmosphere and ideas I found in them.
Made entirely in Procreate, each piece developed differently, allowing colour, texture, shape and composition to become another way of listening.
I usually start with the song itself rather than an image.
I listen to it repeatedly and let certain feelings, images or moments stay with me before putting anything down. From there, I begin sketching and experimenting in Procreate, sometimes starting with a figure, sometimes with a shape, a colour or simply a vague visual feeling. Either way, I have this weird habit that, whatever task I am working on, I assign a song to it. It sounds weird, right? But as I love working on multiple projects and things together, whenever I have to recollect the memory, I play the song and it flashes automatically so yeah.
The final illustrations are built digitally, but I wanted them to retain the irregularity and looseness of something drawn by hand. The textures, marks and colours are deliberately allowed to remain visible rather than being cleaned up into something too perfect.
Each illustration became its own little world.
A quiet portrait of stillness, memory and everything that remains unsaid.
For Baithi Hai, I wanted the image to feel intimate and almost dreamlike. The figure sits within a dense field of colour and texture, with the surrounding marks becoming less like a physical environment and more like thoughts, memories or emotions gathering around her.
The warm reds and yellows create a sense of closeness, while the darker silhouette gives the image a quiet weight.
I began with the central figure and gradually built the surrounding space around it in Procreate. Instead of defining everything sharply, I allowed colour and texture to overlap, letting the background and figure almost dissolve into one another.
Song Link: YouTube: Click Here for YouTube video Spotify: Click Here for Spotify App
A journey inward, drawn through doors, corridors and a figure moving through the unknown.
The illustration imagines a seemingly endless passage of rooms and doorways, with a small human figure somewhere at its centre.
I was interested in the idea of movement without knowing exactly where you are going, one space leading into another, each opening revealing another possibility. The exaggerated perspective and strong orange, purple and black forms turn the architecture into something almost psychological.
I built the composition around repeating frames and perspective lines, gradually pushing them deeper into the image. The limited colour palette and hand-drawn marks were used to give the architectural forms a graphic, almost print-like character.
Song Link: YouTube: Click Here for YouTube video Spotify: Click Here for Spotify App
A figure standing still while everything around him keeps moving.
For Beparwaah, I imagined a person surrounded by an almost impossible tangle of coloured forms. The ribbons twist, cross and disappear into one another, while the figure remains small and grounded at the centre.
The image became less about illustrating a particular moment and more about creating a feeling of being surrounded by things you cannot completely control or understand.
I started with the figure and the circular ground beneath him, then built the flowing forms outward. Each ribbon was drawn as a separate visual element before being layered and intertwined to create the sense of movement around the character.
Song Link: YouTube: Click Here for YouTube video Spotify: Click Here for Spotify App
Three songs. Three visual worlds. One experiment: seeing what music might look like.