Mindful Creative Living With Ujjwala Bassi
“Live out of your imagination, not your history.” — Stephen Covey
Most of us spend our lives consumed with the never-ending fear and impending ruminations of the various “what ifs” that plague our existence. We mull, overthink, self-destruct, and do everything except the things we want to do. All of this in a bid to do what’s right, what’s acceptable, and often what’s deemed as “good” by those around us.
Unfortunately, this makes us miss out on living because all we do is survive. We survive the expectations and pressures that surmount us but we forget to live for ourselves in the process. So we don’t end up doing what we like and this leads to perennial despair and regret, which then leads to the birth of popular quotes such as “You only live once” and “It’s now or never.”
Luckily for us, some people refuse to live caged by their fears and anxieties, who live for themselves and do what they want, and how they want to do it. These are the people who inspire the rest of us to do the same. To not follow the herd, to not do something a certain way just because it’s been done that way for as long as we’ve known what living is. These are passionate changemakers and artistic trailblazers who remind us what life is all about–chasing what makes you want to live and pursuing joy in the process.
I have the privilege of being personally acquainted with one such force of nature, my dear friend–Ujjwala Bassi. Ujjwala, 28, currently resides in Delhi, India, and works as an independent illustrator and visual artist. She has previously worked with the likes of boAt, Penguin Random House, SunPharma, Global Health Strategies, and many more.
I sat down for a chat with her about her choice to take the unbeaten path after a conventional, rather stereotypical academic trajectory and the transformational journey that followed suit.
After multiple canceled and postponed plans due to a multitude of factors outside our control, Ujjwala and I finally caught up over a Google Meet call on a humid Sunday evening in mid-July 2024. As we are both perched in our respective rooms, we discuss everything from career to life, striking a balance, and beyond.
I’m not sure if my words can do justice to the powerhouse Ujjwala Bassi but I will try.
Ujjwala chose the unconventional path of pursuing her artistic passion full-time after studying the most conventional degree possible for an Indian kid: engineering. I met Ujjwala through an online fan community in 2015 when we were both in college. At the time, she was doing her BTech in Computer Science Engineering. How she ended up there is a tale worth retelling.
She recalls fondly, “During my early childhood years I was in an experimental school, Study Hall Lucknow, where there was a heavy focus on co-curriculars and arts of all kinds, be it music, drawing, theatre, or sports. There were no conventional exams and tests till middle school, rather the teachers used to grade us on our daily performance.” Ujjwala believes the creative root of her journey and building on her creative instincts began at Study Hall.
However, after primary school, she shifted to New Delhi with her family and got lost in the crude and mundane academic route which made her go on to pursue an engineering degree. She says, “My first year of engineering itself taught me that this was not my cup of tea, which made me dabble in a lot of places all at once.”
Despite some level of disillusion about what her next steps would be, Ujjwala serendipitously ended up surrounded by artists around this time and she was shown a light at the end of the tunnel. Enveloped with the fear of being chained to a desk in a typical office setup that wouldn’t seek to encourage her creativity, she yearned for an opportunity to explore a creative career without sacrificing any sense of stability.
When she realised that even corporate organizations hire artists and working at studios was always an option, she was intrigued. But what truly resonated with her was the fact that she could be self-employed and choose when to work, how to work, and most importantly–what to work on.
She tells me, “I think there are a lot of kids in art that lose their way through life due to lack of support or mentorship, I luckily was able to reconnect with my inner child’s instincts and pursue what makes me the happiest — art.”
I’m sure we’ve all heard the adage that “Knowledge never goes waste,” and I see it manifest itself with Ujjwala who has blended her background in engineering, which might seem completely unrelated to anything remotely creative, with her career as an artist.
Interestingly enough, she began her career as a graphic designer and she recounts, “My two worlds connected when I first started working as a graphic designer so I learned and used various software for this. My background in engineering helped me become a self-taught graphic designer by the time I was in my fourth year in college. I even sat out of placements and took that time to learn the software.”
Right out of college though, Ujjwala made it a point to keep herself occupied and began pursuing projects through friends and family. She remained dedicated to the goal of pursuing her career as a self-employed artist, no matter what it took. Initially, it took graphic design projects to help people she already knew, and this gradually grew into her network expanding, in conjunction with her work. Over time, Ujjwala realised she enjoyed illustrating more than she’d ever enjoyed graphic designing due to the creativity it entailed.
She then tells me about the time she designed a wedding invite and how this was a turning point in her creative journey, “I used watercolours to create the illustration on paper and then scanned the art by hand to put it in the invite.”
This was when it struck her that the process of creating a watercolour painting for the wedding invite brought her more joy and fulfilment than any part of the design process ever did–whether it was layouts or printing. This led her to the epiphany that illustrating was the process that connected Ujjwala to her inner child. She says with a warm smile, “I go back to feeling like that 6-year-old kid drawing on the corridor boards of my school, losing myself in colours and dirtying my hands with all kinds of mediums be it paints, oil pastels, crayons, pencil or ink.”
Ujjwala is in tune with her inner creative self and she tells me that a healthy creative life involves a lot of play which she can do a lot more through illustration as a medium. Whether consciously or subconsciously, this made her attract illustration projects even more, proving that the law of attraction is always at play.
Currently, she spends 85% of her time on illustration projects.
We all have childhood aspirations of who we want to be when we grow up. Very few of us live up to those dreams because life happens. Similarly, at 15, Ujjwala would have never considered her artistic endeavours becoming anything beyond a hobby she would pursue as she grew up and aspired to tread on a formal career path as is usually intended for most of us.
Growing up, most of us are never explicitly told it’s okay, least of all encouraged, to pursue a creative career. Nobody in Ujjwala’s family has ever pursued a creative career professionally either so she is a first-generation disruptor in every sense breaking that generational pattern. Despite all this, she fondly tells me, “My parents were supportive of the transition even though they were clueless about what was to come.”
Ujjwala serves as creative inspiration to budding creatives in her family as well who look up to her as a catalyst to pursue an unconventional career path and to think in ways they’d never known before.
Speaking of her creative journey, I ask her about burnout and the very real struggle of separating work from leisure when both carefully intertwine in a creative person’s life. She candidly tells me, “Creative burnouts are inevitable and when you pursue a creative career, since it has to be churned. To balance my creativity, I try to be transparent with my clients and I suggest a schedule change for a better output from me. Most of them appreciate the transparency and understand the creative process.”
Along with this, Ujjwala advocates for regular breaks and resetting times that help her focus on herself and get back to her inner creative being. She loves reading self-improvement books, focusing on her fitness through cycling or workouts, and taking care of herself so she can return to her drawing board with a renewed sense of passion and energy. Above all, she emphasises the importance of keeping herself emotionally and creatively healthy.
Ujjwala loves planners and considers herself one over being a doer. “I have three planners in front of me right now. I need structure in my day because every day looks so different given the nature of the projects I’m working on and the people I’m dealing with, including international clients, so having a structure in my day helps,” she says as she adds that she is intuition driven too and takes up things on a whim even when they’re not planned but leans more towards the planning side when it comes to the planner-doer spectrum.
Going forward, Ujjwala wants to diversify her income to prevent any unforeseen circumstances from stalling her career. She envisions having different art streams, teaching budding illustrators and artists, and setting up her shop so that she can provide art prints for home and office decor to people far and wide.
She tells me vehemently, “As I grow older, I don’t envision myself drawing on a screen. I prefer the canvas and that’s where I see myself in the future.” She prioritises the importance of calming her nervous system down especially as someone living in a big city herself and recounts how early on in her career she struggled to fulfil her personal creativity but now she actively makes it a point to create for herself too. She tells me about her “bad art” and how it keeps her creatively healthy. “I have a drawing pad which only I can see, it lets me create whatever I want without the pressure of being paid for it or being scrutinised for it if I put it up on social media, and this keeps me creatively healthy,” Ujjwala says.
When asked about her advice for newbies trying to establish themselves as self-employed artists and independently so, Ujjwala is decisive in the advice she gives to such hopefuls. “Practice is important. You need to make bad art because not everything has to be good. You also need to make mistakes and learn from them,” she says and I already know she’s going to give me many more such gems. As I listen intently, I notice so much of her advice applies to just about any young professional in today’s turbulent economic and professional landscape.
She continues to tell me about artistic styles and how long it takes to develop one, something anyone starting out shouldn’t stress about. Ujjwala is a disciplined and focused artist herself so she emphasises this in her advice to anyone wanting a creative career too. Since she’s a practitioner of what she preaches so this comes tried and tested. She then tells me about the importance of boundaries and how compromising your worth to establish yourself as an artist is never worth it.
Finally, she tells me something I’m probably already applying to my professional life subconsciously ever since I spoke to her. She says, and I internalise, “I’ve built a second personality for myself at work who is assertive and doesn’t cower down even to people twice my age when I’m talking about work because they are contemporaries to me and I’m working with them and not for them so that helps me get the work done without feeling bad about being rude or being exploited in any way.”
The biggest takeaway from my envigorating conversation with Ujjwala is that creativity isn’t about the art you create, it’s about how you feel on a day-to-day basis. You don’t have to be a full-time artist or a professional creative to apply the principles of creative living to your life. It doesn’t matter if you find joy in your 9–5 corporate job or your 24/7 creative project, or if you don’t find joy in either at the moment and you’re still seeking it. What matters is that you find what brings you joy and let it consume you in the most wholesome way. In a world steeped with doom scrolling, we need that light at the end of the tunnel that reminds us we’re worth living for. Thankfully for us, artists like Ujjwala give us that hope through the art they create and the creative life they foster every day.
Before you leave this page, if you’re interested in reaching out to Ujjwala, and you should be, please find her on Behance, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
