This piece started off very simply with someone asking me if I had tried illustrating the life of Karna, one of the characters from the Indian Epic “Mahabharat”.
He’s one of those tragic heroes who was incredibly skilled and talented and yet fate played a cruel trick on him and denied him the greatness that he seemed destined to attain. His entire life is littered with tragedy after tragedy starting with his being abandoned as a child and being cursed by various people for things that were not his fault.
For this piece, it struck me that he was supposed to be the son of the Sun god Surya, it was fittingly symbolic when I set Karna’s life story in the form of a clock where the story begins at 6AM with his birth and ends at 5PM with his death. I also tried to map the colors of the hour according the mood of the incident occurring from light to dark along a semi-rainbow set of shades.
