The Indian Artist, Final Year: I’m Publishing a Book!!

Good Evening Everyone! I hope that you are all doing well! I am very excited to share today’s blog post with you all. This is a project that is very close to my heart and something that I have been working on for almost a year now!

As some of you may know, I am pursuing a career in medicine with the goal of becoming a surgeon. For a long time, I have been searching for ways to integrate my love and passion for art with my commitment to medicine. In December 2022, I had the good fortune of being hired as a Medical Illustrator. In May 2023, I was asked to be the Creative Design Director for a UCLA-based non-profit organization called Pages for Pediatrics and help establish its first chapter at the University of Michigan.

Pages for Pediatrics aims to write and illustrate children’s storybooks working to normalize patient adversity, advocate for disability representation, and combat stigma towards pediatric conditions in the broader community. To help alleviate patient anxiety, we center children’s storybooks around characters that pediatric patients can relate to as a means of instilling hope, comfort, and solidarity. In order to ensure that every patient has unhindered access to our therapeutic stories, we raise funds to cover the production and distribution of our books so we can donate copies to pediatric patients at C.S. Mott’s Children’s Hospital and others nationwide. This is a dream opportunity for me and something that I am so priveleged to be a part of.

I am very excited to announce that our first book, Leela’s Braids, is set to be published in mid-April!! I helped to write this book centered on Alopecia areata and fully illustrated it myself! This has been an incredible project for me and one that I am very proud to share with you all.

If you are interested in purchasing a copy of Leela’s Braids and supporting Pages for Pediatrics, please feel free to fill out the following order form by April 17th: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdZo0A0l_c0ry2wKDTSYjxJUDb7q4jkYyayQv0qN1beCYPdng/viewform

This would make for a wonderful gift for any little ones and family that you may have. I truly appreciate all of you who have continued to read my posts over the past four years. With my time at U of M coming close to an end, I am so priveleged to leave this project behind.

I look forward to sharing more of the book with you all in the coming weeks leading up to its release. Until then, please feel free to reach out to me or comment if you have any questions, concerns, or thoughts! If you would like to see my work, please feel free to check out my website and follow me on Instagram.

Sincerely,

Riya

Instagram: @riya_aggarwal.art

Website: https://theindianartist.weebly.com/