Love for ocean through art

Shruti Shrivastava who hails from Bhopal aka 'the city of lakes', is a self-taught artist and has been painting since she was a kid.

Shruti left her job of interior designing and followed her passion for art. She shares, "I followed my passion for art and left my job as an interior designer 3 years back and currently working as a full-time artist. And it's the most beautiful thing and the best decision I took. I work with a variety of mediums like oil, acrylic, pencils, resin and even digital. I love ocean and I love creating pieces with water elements, I do commissioned artwork, Wall art, I take workshops and I create detailed ocean pieces with resin."

The concept of Oceana, is filled with the elements of oceans. Later, she discovered that as an artist and realized her style has water elements and blue color in all of her artworks.

She adds, "Being just so obsessed with ocean I decided I will take oceans as my theme as my style of work. So, I started my page called Oceana. It is a Greek name and its meaning is "from the sea" so all my artworks and pieces are inspired by ocean. I create a variety of things inspired by ocean including paintings, décor items, jewelry, clocks and sell them too. I love experimenting with different mediums, I was keen in creating resin ocean pieces and it took me around 2-3 months to learn resin work on my own, "oceana" I started last year, when I finally realized it's oceans that make my heart go melt and I would want to paint, and created pieces of inspired by the ocean throughout my life."

Starting her own art page was easy for Shruti as she already had an Instagram account with more than 7k followers that time. She was already into art business and so she created a niche for her ocean inspired artwork.

"However, getting the correct audience that can be converted to customer was a task, slowly slowly it all picked up, it takes a lot of sleepless nights and dedication to stick to what you have decided.

hen I started the business, it was filled with a lot of struggles, I just left my job and listened to my heart without any proper backup, but deep down I knew this is where I belong, getting the right customers, choosing wrong marketplace and not getting enough orders, not getting paid for the work I had done were really challenging. There were times in fact months with literally zero income and zero orders so I invested that time in creating more artwork and working on my social media platforms without giving up on my dreams," adds the artist

During the lockdown, like the other businesses, Shruti too was unable to get orders and shipping the orders that she already had was all on hold. Lately after the lockdown, she decided to go a lot more digital, started taking online workshop online sales.