Priya Anand

Illustration & murals, Chicago

Four projects. Four completely different sizes. None of them fit a box.

A book jacket, a quarterly magazine column, a 40-foot lobby mural, and a children’s book — shown here roughly to scale with each other, which is why the grid looks the way it does.

A tall torn-paper collage tile with one dominant dark-olive panel bleeding off the top edge and a smaller rust-colored panel torn into its lower third, standing in for the Undertow book cover.

Undertow

Book cover art, literary fiction

Gouache underpainting, ink line, 2 rounds of client revision

A wide torn-paper collage tile with three roughly equal rust and olive panels arranged side by side like a magazine spread, one panel torn at a sharp diagonal, standing in for the Fieldnotes Quarterly column art.

Fieldnotes Quarterly

Recurring editorial illustration column

Ink and digital color, one spread per issue, six issues a year

A very wide, horizontally banded torn-paper collage tile with five staggered olive and rust panels running the full width, echoing a 40-foot mural's proportions, standing in for the Cannery Row Mural.

Cannery Row Mural

40-foot lobby mural, converted cannery building

Acrylic on primed plaster, 40 ft × 11 ft, eleven days on scaffolding

A collage tile made of eight small torn-paper panels arranged like a grid of book pages, alternating olive and rust at varying rotations, standing in for the Little Fires picture book.

Little Fires

Picture book, ages 4–7

Gouache, 32 pages, one recurring fox character across every spread

A tall torn-paper collage tile with one dominant dark-olive panel bleeding off the top edge and a smaller rust-colored panel torn into its lower third, standing in for the Undertow book cover.

Undertow

Gouache underpainting, ink line, 2 rounds of client revision

The publisher wanted "something that felt like drowning without showing a person drowning." I built the cover around a single wide brushstroke — dark olive pulled sideways across the panel before it dried, so the texture reads as pulled-under motion rather than an illustrated wave. The title type sits inside the stroke's negative space instead of on top of it, which took four proofs to get legible without adding an outline that would've killed the effect.

Client: Harrow & Bell Publishing. Format: hardcover jacket, 6"×9", plus matching paperback reprint.

A wide torn-paper collage tile with three roughly equal rust and olive panels arranged side by side like a magazine spread, one panel torn at a sharp diagonal, standing in for the Fieldnotes Quarterly column art.

Fieldnotes Quarterly

Ink and digital color, one spread per issue, six issues a year

I've drawn the closing spread for Fieldnotes for three years now — always assigned the Monday the writer files, always due Friday. That turnaround is the whole brief: no time for a fully rendered piece, so the style leans into flat torn-paper shapes that read fast and still hold up printed at magazine size. Issue 14's spread went up unframed in the editor's office, which I take as the actual review.

Client: Fieldnotes Quarterly. Format: full-bleed editorial spread, 6 issues/year, ongoing since 2023.

A very wide, horizontally banded torn-paper collage tile with five staggered olive and rust panels running the full width, echoing a 40-foot mural's proportions, standing in for the Cannery Row Mural.

Cannery Row Mural

Acrylic on primed plaster, 40 ft × 11 ft, eleven days on scaffolding

The developer converting the old cannery into offices wanted the lobby mural to reference the building's actual history without being a literal "here's what canning looked like" mural. I worked from the building's original conveyor-line layout, translated into abstracted horizontal bands that read differently walking past at 3 mph than standing still in front of it. First two days were spent just fixing plaster cracks no one had mentioned.

Client: Cannery Row Lofts. Format: 40 ft × 11 ft lobby wall, completed 2024.

“People stop in the lobby now instead of walking straight to the elevator. That wasn't in the brief but I'll take it.”

— Marcus Whitfield, developer, Cannery Row Lofts

A collage tile made of eight small torn-paper panels arranged like a grid of book pages, alternating olive and rust at varying rotations, standing in for the Little Fires picture book.

Little Fires

Gouache, 32 pages, one recurring fox character across every spread

My first full picture book — thirty-two pages, a fox who can't sleep, and an editor who made me redraw the fox's ears four separate times until they read the same from every angle. Consistency across that many spreads turned out to be the actual craft problem, not any single illustration. The published book still has one page where I'm pretty sure the ears are slightly off, and I've made peace with it.

Publisher: Marrow Children's Books. Format: 32-page hardcover picture book, ages 4-7, published 2025.

“Kids don't notice ear consistency. Illustrators apparently do.”

— Dana Okafor, editor, Marrow Children's Books

Priya Anand, Chicago.

Eight years freelance after a BFA in illustration, splitting time roughly evenly between editorial work, book covers, and the occasional mural when the wall and the timeline both make sense. Takes on six to eight projects a year; turns down anything that needs a mascot.

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Priya Anand — Illustrator & Muralist

Priya Anand illustrates book covers, magazine spreads, and building-scale murals from a Chicago studio — four projects, gouache to 40-foot wall.

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