Snehasish Konger

S. Konger Arts is the studio and practice of artist Snehasish Konger, based in Gurugram, India. I started drawing the way most people do — copying comic panels in the back of a school notebook and getting the proportions wrong. The difference is I never really stopped. Somewhere between then and now it turned from a habit into the thing I do.

Most of what I make is portraiture. Devotional work sits alongside pen-and-ink likenesses drawn from photographs people send me, and fan art of the films and manga I grew up inside. They feel like different bodies of work but they're the same problem every time: getting a face to look back at you.

I work almost entirely in Procreate on an iPad, with brushes I've spent years tuning to behave like a 2B pencil on slightly toothy paper. For pen-and-ink pieces I still draw the underlying construction by hand first, on real paper, because I think faster with a pencil than with a stylus. The digital file is where it gets finished, not where it starts.

What I'm actually after is the small thing that makes a specific person that person — the set of a jaw, the way someone's eyes go when they're about to laugh. It's why I ask for more reference photos than you'd expect, and why I'd rather take on fewer commissions and get them right.