ABOUTME
I’m Shubhi, the lettering artist and illustrator behind Bas Aise Hi. I started creating art in 2016 as a distraction from my chronic pain. I live with daily episodes of pain: either migraine or atypical facial pain, which is another thing that I’ll be talking on about here.
If you’re not a Hindi speaker, you might be wondering what does ‘Bas Aise Hi’ mean? In a literal translation, it means ‘just like that’ but it can also be used to say ‘just for fun’. I called my brand this because when I started creating and learning art back in 2016, I used to tell my friend I created this piece today, bas aise hi (just for fun). You see, I wasn’t aiming to be an artist ever, in fact, I was never into drawing or anything related to art until 2016. My only creative outlet was writing and I’m a journalist and have worked on covering various beats over the years: from travel trade, food, and mainstream news to the most recent one, covering the marketing and advertising industry.
I came across the art of lettering in 2016 on an Instagram post, and was immediately smitten. Fascinated with the beautiful letterforms, I started practising to recreate them as well. The more I created, the more I wanted to create. What started with the love for letters, evolved into a full blown affair with watercolours, brush pens, and digital art. I picked up drawing digital illustrations along the way and with an iPad full of so much art, I wanted to share it with the world, and was born the brand Bas Aise Hi by Shubhi.
I’ve been navigating life with migraine for 13 years now, and art came as a friend that always sat with me during the painful flares. In 2016, a few months after I came down with Bell’s Palsy on the right side of my face, I started experiencing a new kind of facial nerve pain on the same side. It was first diagnosed as Trigeminal Neuralgia, but in 2020, the diagnosis has been changed to Atypical Facial Pain.
As my pain increased from 10-15 days a month to daily pain, I started creating and practicing more art. Over the last four years, after trying to ignore my invisible pain for a long time, I have finally accepted its existence & impact and learned to live with it with peace and calm rather than anger, panic and denial. It hasn’t been an easy journey made more difficult by the myriad of misconceptions about invisible pain and disability not just in India, but globally. This is why I am now working on creating awareness about these invisible illnesses and chronic pain at every level that I engage with people on.
I’m still on a lifelong journey on navigating life with chronic pain, as I discover this newfound strength in me to not just cope with the debilitating, daily pain but also create awareness about it. And I’ll be using art to guide me through this course. I’ll be happy to have you all along for the ride, if you wish to join and show you the world through my migraine-and-art-tinted glasses!