Sachin Tendulkar "Live" on TFOD: by artist Sadashiv Sawant!

An architectural rendering professional (though qualified as a mechanical engineer), Sadashiv Sawant was inspired to try his hand at pencil sketches – after accidentally seeing some wonderful sketches on the internet. The hobby soon turned into a full-fledged passion – with his forte evolving, over time, into one focusing on the ‘face’ 

So faces it is – with each hair, every wrinkle, the tiniest zit on the cheek, the slightest slit between the teeth – all recorded for posterity, on paper! The eyes, though are the most powerful feature in each of the sketches.  Whether the facial expression is stern or smiling, whether it is a frontal sketch or a profile, it is the eyes that ‘talk’ to the viewers! Succinctly capturing the emotional state of the person – Sawant renders his subject’s eyes to perfection! The brow, the lashes, the tilt of the eye, the glint within – it’s all there… just exactly as we see in a photograph.

And of course, it is natural for an artist to veer towards sketching celebrities; because a. there are hundreds of high-resolution photographs available freely on the net, and b. they attract attention more quickly!

Whatever be the reason, or motivation, the fact remains that today Sawant’s portfolio boasts of an incredible number of stunning pencil renderings of famous faces! The list includes Kate Winslet, Sean Connery, and closer home – Pramukh Swami Maharaj, Hafeez Contractor, Katrina Kaif, Amitabh Bachchan, and the latest – Sachin Tendulkar.

But Sachin Tendulkar is no ordinary celebrity. His face has been etched on our collective consciousness over the past thirty years – we have literally watched him grow from a teenager into a young man, and now at 45, he must be easily one of the best-known faces worldwide. To have rendered this impressive sketch, Sawant must have toiled for months… adding the finest lines and dots -till it becomes virtually impossible to tell it apart from a high-resolution photo of the cricketer!

Says the artist about his prolific subject: “I totally believe that ‘If cricket were a religion, Sachin would be God.’ No words can express his amazing talent, power and achievement. He has given us tremendous joy with his game for 25 successive years. Every Indian is proud of him."

This absolutely brilliant, hyper-realistic rendition in pencil will then adorn the cover of the soon-to-be-published book and will see the versatile artist scale new heights of fame and success! We congratulate artist Sadashiv Sawant on his success, and look forward to seeing more and more of his wonderful work!

Wonder who’s next on the list, though?!