Before Nayna could walk, she learned how to pick up a crayon and draw a crooked circle with it.
As a toddler, I would always complete the circle. And I’d draw two dots inside and call it a baby.
One of the first pieces of art she remembers being really proud of was a drawing of Goku (from Dragon Ball Z). Both her parents loved it, and her dad told her that it was better than any Goku rendition he could have created. This was high praise, given that both Nayna’s parents have legitimate artistic talents. Those words always stayed with her, and she has created art – formally and informally, professionally and for herself, in every form and medium – ever since.
Today (circa January 2026), Nayna is a Senior UX Designer at Google; she has worked in a variety of design and art/design-adjacent fields.
I’m Nayna Yadav and I like making things beautiful.
I did my undergraduate in Industrial Design from Symbiosis, worked for two years trying different things and then, did a Masters in Communication Design from IDC IITB. Since then I’ve worked as a Visual Designer, an Assistant Professor, a Creative Director, and a Product Designer.
I like doing new things.
In this feature, we look at Nayna’s journey as an artist and designer, while also covering her personal illustration and animation projects (you can see many of them here) in detail, with our analyses and her perspectives.
Becoming a Designer | Remaining a Lifelong Artist
As an undergraduate, Nayna studied industrial design for four years. During this period, she stopped drawing for herself entirely for a while, the first time this had ever happened. And she felt the void within her, and made a conscious decision to get back to sketching and drawing. She instantly felt how right it was, and realized that she would always need to have a personal art practice. Back then, it was only drawing; today, Nayna keeps her inner muse fed with things of beauty and wonder in multiple forms, including crochet and ceramics.
It was during her first job that she picked up Photoshop and Illustrator and started creating digital art both at work and for herself, fueling innovation in a new medium. Over time, she’s grown proficient at using different software suites; today, Nayna uses Procreate, Illustrator for vector illustrations, After Effects for motion, and Cavalry for interactive data visualizations. She also uses Figma at work.
And her usage of these software tools has also evolved over time. Her first few pieces created using PS or AI were direct transferences of the process of drawing on paper to the digital medium. But now she leverages all the things that can only be done virtually, and creates digital artworks that use the full spectrum of functions. Many of the pieces on her Instagram page are short animations that began life as illustrations; she moves from software to software with the same fluid grace with which she transitions between mediums.
An analysis of some of Nayna’s pieces reveals how diverse her influences, interests, and art styles are; it also reveals several interesting common qualities.
The Howl’s Moving Castle Tribute
This Studio Ghibli tribute is one of Nayna’s best pieces (in our opinion. But also objectively).
Watch Nayna’s Howl’s Moving Castle tribute here.
I love Ghibli for a lot of reasons (the art ofc, the food, the magic, the flora and fauna, the wholesomeness) but especially for how it portrays women- in Nausicaä, the protagonist is a very cool, kind hearted heroine. In Spirited Away it’s a lil girl trying to save her parents. In Mononoke the villain, Lady Eboshi, is a very relatable woman. As is San, the wolf girl. In Kaguya, a literal goddess, who is so grounded.
In Howl, the movie’s title suggests it’s about Howl’s castle but that’s only the visual focal point. The story, to me, is that of an ordinary girl who is extraordinarily kind and sensible. She’s not magical or popular or special or gorgeous. She’s just doing her best and that saves everyone and she in turn has the most extraordinary experiences. Howl is a very comforting movie. And that particular scene just happens to be my favourite for how lovely and magical it is and how it foreshadows Sophie’s extraordinary life to come.
This piece is all sharpness and angles and fury, and the craggy contours of Howl’s face could have poems written to them; his nose and chin could cut diamonds, his talons could rip universes to shreds. And the few soft lines in the piece contrast with the angles beautifully; the human side of those who must take up arms to prevent and end war is both an explicit theme of the film and an explicit theme of this artwork.
The faces of Howl and Sophie fill less than 5% of the real estate of this illustration-animation, but . Even if you know nothing about Howl’s Moving Castle, Sophie’s expression captures the mix of sheer terror and exhilaration that might fill you if a magical wizard decided to take you soaring through the ether at the speed of a peregrine falcon, the air roaring through your hair as the earth receded below.
This Howl’s Moving Castle tribute moves, and the movement is lovely. The animation lasts only a fraction of a second before it loops infinitely, but that fraction of a second is infinitely satisfying, creating one of those loops that you can watch forever. Sophie and Howl are shown in flight, and their movement in the animation feels like the way wings open and close.
This piece looks nothing (visually) like the poster of the film, but it feels like the film, and like its poster. Maybe it’s the swirliness, or the magic that hangs like a cloak over both poster and animated short, or Nayna’s intense love of Studio Ghibli that bleeds through into her tribute and invests it with even more magic.
And magic is really the theme of Nayna’s Howl’s Moving Castle piece. The background is a treat in itself, and you find yourself wishing that Sophie and Howl would move a little so you could see the entire background, or that you had access to an open file with layers so you could hide all except one in turn and admire each layer in all its glory. Even the fact that the red-orange clouds that swirl beneath Sophie and Howl shift with the movement of Howl’s wings is delightful, placing the piece firmly in a universe where wizards exist, and where transformation into a were-bird is possible, and where the the flapping of the were-bird’s wings create currents that carry the magic with them.
Creating fan art is one of the most daunting tasks there is. The creator always has very exacting standards for the level of the output; it has to be something that is worthy of laying on the altar of a piece of pop culture that is sacred to them. On the other hand, the creator is themselves an artist, and they are naturally inclined to interpret the original work of art in their own style. This Howl’s Moving Castle tribute walks the tightrope between the endlessly fascinating universe that is the Studio Ghibli art style on the one hand, and the no-less-fascinating world of Nayna’s imagination and the many visual languages she wields with ease.
Everything is splendidly impossible: eyes set into sorcerous bookcases, bookcases that feel like grandfather clocks, arcane symbols, domes, the power of flight…Nayna’s detailing make it a labor of love, a mirror held up to the care with which each frame of the original film was crafted and polished into the unique filmic gemstone it is.
The Cubbon Park Piece
Cubbon Park is many things: a park in Bengaluru, one of the city’s most beloved green spaces, really old (it’s been more or less like it is now for a century and a half), a social hotspot (the number of joggers and walkers on Sunday morning, for example, is mind-boggling), and a treat for the eyes (there are interesting trees, gently sloping rock formations, gazebos, and a toy train).
Nayna’s Cubbon Park illustration is a minimalist depiction of a single scene from Cubbon Park. It uses only two colors, focuses mainly on one tree and some background vegetation: a simple nature scene.
But it still has so much to say. For example, the tree is not a perfect, straight-limbed, symmetrically-leafed, proud denizen of the park. No, the trunk is slightly spindly; it leans like its name is Pisa. The branches above sprawl at every possible angle, the leaves grow from the branches and the trunk; splendidly real, not landscaped at all. There is so much beauty in this asymmetry, though. The trunk’s angle to the vertical is full of glorious opportunity; one can only lean back comfortably against a slanted backrest; orthogonal seats are for classrooms. The branches on top that dip and skew and swirl are natural steps so that the adventurous can ascend and spend an afternoon reading, lost within both the pages of history and the leafy canopy of a tree in the prime of its life.
Cubbon Park is easily the best part of Bangalore. If you’re not big on drinking, Cubbon is the peak of what the city offers. And it has everything I love. Trees, flowers, long walks, lots of animals and rides outside!
The friend I went with when I sketched this was of the same mindset and we would carry a flask of tea and spend occasional Sunday mornings in Cubbon. We would walk around and play with the dogs. That day she was reading her book while I was sketching. It was a very peaceful morning.
The slice of Cubbon Park life captured within the illustration contains every single trait that makes Cubbon Park great (except possibly the friendly pets who populate one section). There is the authenticity; every tree and stone has been allowed to grow undisturbed, and not hacked into compliance. There are the angles and curves: even the rock outcrops in the park are a little ungainly, just like this tree; and a lot lovable, just like this tree. There is the green haze that hangs over everything, a portal to the healing power of nature.
Nayna’s trademark investing of her art with fantasy elements is in evidence in this piece as well, though it is slightly muted. The greens are ever-so-slightly fluorescent, the browns ever-so-slightly pink. It makes Cubbon Park feel like it does in our memories: even more vivid and wonderful than it actually is.
Looking at the Cubbon Park piece, you will feel calm; you will be transported to the stillness of a Sunday morning spent in the midst of nature, where everything seems possible, and where you can sleep all day without worrying about mundane nonsense like deadlines or emails or salaries or laundry.
Untitled / Selfie
This piece is tons of fun: a partial inventory of its contents serves as proof. There’s a skull. The skull wears an ornate helmet. The helmet is winged (hello Hermes) and has multiple heart jewels. Red is the MVP of the piece; from the hearts to the ribbons in the skull’s hair, it contrasts beautifully with the strong blacks and iron greys that fill the piece.
Oh, and there’s a tongue-in-cheek title option / hashtag as well: #selfie.
This could be an elaborate jeweled ring worn by the leader of a troop of outlaw bikers. It could be an elaborate sigil carved above the door of a Demon Lord in a fantasy videogame. It could be the design for the backs of a deck of playing cards or tarot cards or oracle cards. It could be a sticker that adds several metric tons of personality to a wardrobe. It could be a heavy metal album cover.
But it’s also badass in a different way. It is metal and skull-centric and skull-encrusted, but also soft and be-ribboned and covered with hearts and features elaborately braided hair. The overall effect sums up what the modern day Bhartiya Naari is all about: empowered and secure in both her strength and softness.
I wanted to use the Chola / Vijayanagara royal + temple aesthetic but on the skull of a lil Indian school girl. Like a badass undead ruler who goes to school in pigtails. I did not think much more beyond that.
And there are visual echoes of other empowered women in other times, other worlds of fiction, and other places. The piece feels a lot like the depictions of Alice (of Wonderland fame), both in the original novel and interpretations by other artists. There is the slightly steampunk feel of the metal machines that surround the skill. There are red hearts, recalling one of the original’s most enduring characters. There is the delightful insanity of it all. And the fact that Alice has also been portrayed as a Victorian woman with agency in the expanded universe – from the recent films to music and games – furthers the framing of this piece as a feminist iconic portrayal: a woman who does not need to look like the world expects, who can be steel and fury while still being full of love.
Nayna’s Art Styles
After studying a variety of topics related to visual design and branding during her postgraduate degree program, Nayna has continued to work professionally in these areas, while diversifying her personal art practice. Her work is not entirely rooted in reality; it often starts with real life, grounded objects, but her explorations of those objects wander off into strange dimensions and fantastical realms, reflecting her active imagination, creating fun and unexpected visual experiences.
Her work contains a multitude of (pop) cultural and experiential influences, all of which have been filtered through the prism of her imagination and added to her own creativity to create a unique series of art styles.
Nayna’s mother is an accomplished textile designer, and Nayna credits her early fascination with cloth, embroidery, craft, and patterns to this fact. When she grew a little older, she had an entire phase where she experimented with horror art – from Hieronymus Bosch to Francis Bacon – initially imitating visual themes, but quickly transitioning to her very own interpretations of these. Even today, the body horror that sometimes inhabits her animations, where eyes and tongues swap places with the liquid ease of dissolution, traces its origins back to that phase.
Her first brush with Japanese culture came, as it did for many Indian children growing up in the early 2000s, with Dragon Ball Z, and she quickly grew to love anime. As she read more about the Impressionists after discovering Monet as a teenager, Nayna realized how much the West had borrowed from Japan, across so many art forms.
Japan has perfected every art form: visuals of flowers, clay, storytelling, horror (Satoshi Kon!)…
The influence of Japanese culture on Nayna’s work has both immediately apparent and subtle aspects. The depiction of nature and her otherworldly color palettes are both direct visual references, while many of her pieces feel like classic Japanese anime or movie posters without looking anything like them.
Today, many of Nayna’s favorite artists are designers and illustrators whose work is influenced, often very subtly, by their Indian heritage. For example, she enjoys the work of Mira Malhotra (https://www.instagram.com/kokumkohla) and Khyati Trehan (https://www.instagram.com/khyatitrehan).
Cats
A sizable portion of Nayna’s artistic output features cats. There are illustrations of cats, animated shorts where cats are adorable for a few short seconds and you wish they were longer, cat infographics, and even faux-movie posters featuring felines and their humans.
There are so many artists who’ve dedicated their lives to trying to capture the essence of cats. They’re this beautiful, cuddly enigma.
And they’re the perfect companions- they’re beautiful, graceful, loving but they also give you space.
Léo Forest, Jang Koal, Louis Wain are just a few of the top of my head who’ve done such inspiring work and their inspiration is solid so ig that helps? There’s nothing to dislike. Even when cats are mean, they’re just so cute!
The Cat House piece feels like the most chaotic and fun posters from the Cowboy Bebop and Kurosawa stables, possibly even like movie posters for Spaghetti Westerns and their Indian reinterpretations, like Sholay. Its palette further elevates its subject material, depicting the cats as the absolute monarchs they are, and their loyal humans as key characters who are, however, still relegated to the supporting cast. The artistic decision to show the cats staring purposefully off into the distance (as they do), in contrast to their non-cat subjects, further places them front and center.
The most delightful design elements of this piece are perhaps the curved right angles. Nowhere is there exact orthogonality; the font in which Cat House is written (which is spectacular, by the way), feels like overgrown creepers and natural approximately-ninety-degree angles. The cats’ eyes we can see are works of art that have liquid right angles within them. Even the subjects either look at the viewer or to the left, but ever so slightly askew. This makes everything feel more real; we want an entire season, to get to know these cats and their people, to understand the dynamic, to laugh with them, to wonder what happens in the next episode. To be a fly on the wall in a house with two cats and three young people.
And the shockingly sharp cat claws wrapped around a drink at the bottom left of the poster create the best Easter Egg ever; talons mirroring the long nails that Nayna thought her human flatmate should have.
I was drawing Peanut resting in the balcony- and initially it was just a rough sketch of Peanut. It was a digital sketch and those are endlessly editable.
So I was like let’s add Whiskey.
And then I decided to make it a family portrait.
We used to joke that the house could be a TV show. 5 girls (of which 2 are cats and the others catty) living in a massive duplex with endless guests, boyfriends, stray cats and pet dogs visiting us. It was chaos and it was very entertaining.
Kshipra named our trio of her, Pari and me, “Hoegarden” for the beer and for the hoes lol.
And from that I derived the name Cat House to include our kitties but also because it’s a pun for a brothel (because hoes).
Nayna’s cat, Miko (short for Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21), is a magnificent mixture of orangeness and fur and photogenic stares at the camera. This piece feels like a lovingly curated collage of some of his most special photos. Only, the individual collage elements are not photos, but intricate digital illustrations that are inspired by photos, but that are then treated with Nayna’s trademark mixture of imagination and surrealism.
The vines and stems and leaves have the ethereal quality of smoke, and the orange hue that suffuses all the natural elements both elevates them to a strange and wonderful plane, while also transferring Miko’s color to them. Because of course an orange cat would remake all of creation in his image, if he could be bothered. And this makes us think of camouflage and Miko’s primeval ancestors stalking their prey, blithely unaware that their descendant would one day rule a house, and a human, and an Instagram page, and several gigabytes of phone memory.
A few artistic decisions that make the piece even better at being a love letter to Miko than it already would have been: the positioning of Nayna holding Miko at the center, slightly larger than the other elements. This gives the impression of an all-encompassing hug, enveloping the luckiest of cats in infinite love. The moments chosen occupy every thematic corner of the mood spectrum from lithe hunter to sassy, beribboned supermodel, to Observer-Of-All. The sheer number of elements makes everything feel impossibly large, like the entire universe revolving around Miko, but those elements are also arranged so that nothing feels crowded. As in Cat House, the fact that the various versions of Miko look straight at the viewer, and to the right, and to the left, and away from everything, make everything feel dynamic and large.
Imagine taking slices of the life of a being you love dearly, and sending them on a journey of the mind through gardens filled with color and life and the sun, and welcoming them back all wound with tendrils and gloriously transformed. That’s what’s happening in this piece: multiple avatars of one gorgeous cat cavort and gambol and stretch lazily.
The Bollywood Beauty series
Three vector illustranimations. Bollywood icons. Interesting eyes. Animated nightmare fuel.
That’s our attempt at encompassing the multiple infinities contained in the Bollywood Beauty series within a (self-imposed) ten word limit, and it works about as well as you would expect.
Each of the three artworks in the series can be enjoyed either as a standalone illustration or as a short animation. Before the animation starts, you might say to yourself: okay, those are vector illustrations of three iconic Bollywood stars. I like them; they look really good. But all is not as I expect it to be: the colour choices are much more interesting than they usually are. And the eyeballs are…extra.
And then the animations start, and all your instincts make sense. The faces which were in repose a second ago change. In one case, the eyeballs act as seeds from which fronds and stems and flowers grow and age and fall: plant evolution sped up from four seasons to four seconds. In another, the eyeballs migrate from the eyes to the mouth and back again, like three-year-olds discovering the joy of being unsupervised in an elevator for the first time. In another, the eyes leap out of their sockets trailing coiled loops of optical nerve fibres, like Wile E. Coyote if he were a cinematic heartthrob.
And the series really reminds us (like the Almost Pretty series does, too) that snapshots of people, of the world, however aesthetic, always have vats of horrorgore bubbling beneath the surface. Our faces hide skulls; a simple mouth/eye swap creates an eldritch creature, and much of what is inside us is scary.
I’ve never thought that hard about what I make- I don’t try to put it into words. I just want something pretty but with a kick. Symmetry and perfection get exhausting.
The pieces in this series are notable also because they’re an example of how Nayna creates art in different styles, something that is unusual. These feel visually different from the rich worlds she populates with details, or from her geometric pattern work, or her trippy animations, or from her celebrations of pop culture. But they’re all imbued with the same soul, and they therefore have a signature style attached to them. It’s complicated, but also wonderful.
And there are also the more quirky takes on the depiction of Bollywood icons. A self-portrait of Nayna, one that she uses as a display picture on her work Instagram page, feels like a tribute to a pose in which Madhubala was often photographed. Only, Nayna’s self-portrait has fangs and long red fingerclaws, and a secret smile.
In addition to how visually interesting this depiction is, there’s also themes that it makes you consider. For example, the role of the chudail, an unquiet female spirit-ghost-witch, in Indian cinema. Once relegated to B-Movie status, this piece presents a portrayal of a vampiric spirit that may or may not be a chudail, but that certainly is given all the respect and careful detailing normally accorded only to the most successful heroines.
And this particular piece also makes you think about empowerment. Many Bollywood heroines were inspirational, strong independent women in the second half of the 20th century. This self-portrait’s embrace of witchy imagery and accessories indicate an unwillingness to be trammeled by convention: complete freedom. The Bollywood heroines who were originally immortalized through similar imagery (only with a slight reduction in the number of claws and extremely long pointy canines) would be proud of this digital rendition of their soul-sister from the future.
And the witchy imagery is also deliciously present in TGIF.
What does one do on a Friday evening? One kicks back, flings off constricting formal shoes and too-tight formal clothes, relaxes in a warm bath, revels in the freedom and the infinite possibilities that hide behind every contour of a weekend.
What does one do on a Friday evening if one is a witch? Much the same. The warm bath might be a fiery cauldron, there might not be too many formal clothes to divest oneself of (witches are not known for their adherence to corporate style guidelines). But there’s still the phone next to the cauldron, there is still the unholy glee, the sense of complete and utter freedom.
TGIF is great because of how every inch of the witch, every arched foot and relaxed muscle, echo how much all of us love weekends. Also, the witch is fabulous; her makeup on point. Even the denizens of the Underworld dress up (dress down?) for the club.
Other Mediums: Crochet and Clay
When Nayna was very little, she made things out of every material imaginable. Lego, cloth, mechanics sets, papier mâché: all these fueled her early penchant for creating with her hands.
After she joined college, these explorations of physical art reduced, as visual art took over. She did continue to create physical models as part of her industrial design studies, but she found them excessively functional, not as interesting as the personal work she had done earlier in life.
Fortunately, she was to find her way back to making art in different forms.
As I grow older, I’m regressing into my five-year-old self.
In 2021, after moving to Bengaluru, Nayna found that she had quite a bit of free time, even after drawing as much as she wanted to, reading as much as she wanted to. During a spell when she couldn’t fall asleep easily, Nayna rediscovered the joys of origami, putting paper flowers up all around her room. Since then, she has created things of beauty through embroidery, crochet, and air dry clay.
These different mediums have helped her feel fulfilled in her personal art practice; she feels the same sense of completeness while playing around with one of these – or even doing something only tangentially related to art, like baking – that she does while creating illustrations for herself.
The Future
I don’t have any goals- I find them stressful. I think life happens one day at a time and a lot of good days is a good life and that’s how I live? My goals are usually the same- more art, more travel, more friends and hopefully more money.
Links
Nayna Yadav – Website: https://naynay.framer.website/.
Nayna Yadav – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/naynayadav_/.
Nayna Yadav – Creative Portfolio: https://www.behance.net/naynayadav.