Manasai Art

Manasa is an illustrator and comic artist based in Goa. She has been painting since 2019 and has been working professionally since 2023. Her practice is rooted in stories from her grandparents and her village in the Eastern Ghats. Through simple, everyday scenes told with humour, she explores social structures and hierarchies. She primarily works with traditional mediums such as watercolours, ink, and coloured pencils. Her work begins with an illustration that takes about three to four days, moving from ideation and rough sketches to inking and painting on watercolour paper. These illustrations are then printed and hand-bound into notebooks using sugarcane pulp paper, trimmed and finished by hand. Manasa is drawn to slow, traditional processes that mirror the life she depicts. For her, art is storytelling, and each piece carries the layers of stories behind how and why it was made. She hopes that when someone picks up her work, it feels like resting under a mango tree on a warm, quiet afternoon.