PENCIL PERCEPTIONS ACADEMY – A DREAM COME TRUE

Pencil Perceptions Academy –  A Dream Come True!

“Since I was a kid, I am extremely fascinated by the amazing skills people have in them, the dedication they put to achieve the extraordinary level of their skill, the journey travelled by them for their passion. I am more fascinated by such artists.

I was never attracted by higher ranking in academic education. The one thing my mother always told me was that “people should not come to you because of your degree in education, but they should come to you by seeing your work”. And this meant a lot in my life.

That is the reason why I have always given more importance to developing a skill rather than falling in trap of the ranking system. I never believed that academic education is the only away to be a successful person.  Although I was good in my academic studies, my heart was pulling me towards drawing, painting and music always. For the satisfaction of my parents, I took academic education in school & college but I guess destiny had already planned a path for me. I faced such conditions & challenges in my life that ultimately I had to take support of my skills in drawing & painting to support my family in difficult financial conditions.

I had started making portraits, story pictures for magazines & newspaper, architectural renderings for architects. And honestly, I had started enjoying the work that I was doing with all my heart. But after working for almost 25 years in architectural rendering in Computer Graphics, one fine morning, I thought that why not try and make a portrait of my son. And so, I started to make the portrait and to my surprise, even after 25 years, the pencil did not feel wrong in my hand and the sketch of my son seemed more satisfactory to me than the old sketches that I had made before 25 years. I was wondering that, “How did all this happen?”  Then I realized that while doing architectural rendering for 25 years, my eyes got trained to bring out the realism in any image. After that, I tried making many more sketches to bring realism in pencil drawing & I started falling in love with the textures that were getting created while doing pencil drawing. I absolutely enjoy and admire looking at textures of pencil drawing like nobody else would in this world. Also, I have seen the work of so many legendary pencil and charcoal artists and I realized that they have also given importance to retaining texture in their drawings. Actually, Texture is the soul of pencil drawings. After seeing the work of innumerable artists and from my experience of the architectural rendering, I have developed a method to bring out photo realism in pencil drawing.

While I was going through this process, my little son was growing up and one day he told me that “Dad! I want to become a football player” and I was happy that he chose his passion over the “so called” ideal way of following the academics. He started following his passion diligently and I had given him a free hand to follow his passion. And one day I thought that, why not give a free hand to myself too to follow my passion of pencil drawing. I expressed this thought to my wife Prabuddha Sawant and my brother Durganand Sawant and both have supported me a lot in all the ups and downs of following my passion and taken care of other matters in my life. Words cannot express how fortunate I am to have them in my life.

So finally, I decided to create a studio and an academy for teaching and working on different experiments in pencil drawings. It was my dream to create an online course for teaching actual methods of pencil drawing. For that, I had to gather the experience of teaching to every age group. In this mission, one teenager named Komal Thoria joined my academy at the initial stage and as her passion was also drawing and painting, she supported the academy in every way she could do and she made this her world, her only world. I can not forget her contribution in this mission.

While creating videos, one of my colleague, Amrut Sarang joined me for handling video editing. I am amazed by the commitment he has in completing every task. He kept on doing his work no matter what was happening in his life. He is unstoppable. I salute his attitude towards his work. I would like to thank both of these gems in my life and words fall short to express how thankful I am to have them.

 All of my students also supported me in every way they could in this mission of Pencil Perceptions. After the passionate efforts and support from my team and my family, we have completed the program of online teaching in one and a half year. We are ready to share our knowledge and logical methods to teach pencil drawing to those students for whom travelling is a major concern.Learn wherever you are with us. We have your back. I am very much happy to see this progress and a dream turning into reality.

A dream indeed came true and that is Pencil Perceptions Academy.”

-Sadashiv Atmaram Sawant