In Dramatic Colour

Ikshika Mukherjee is a sixteen year old artist from Ontario, Canada who works across half a dozen mediums and refuses to settle into a single style, held together only by her love of bold colour, texture, and representation.

A Mosaic Bridge Project Feature · @1kshika

Ikshika Mukherjee · Bow Lake, Alberta

Ikshika Mukherjee

Visual Artist

Based in

Ontario, Canada

Works in

Graphite, acrylic, watercolour, coloured pencil, oil pastel, digital, mixed-medium

Art has been the one constant in Ikshika Mukherjee's life for as long as she can remember. What started as an ordinary childhood interest, the kind almost everyone picks up and eventually sets down, turned into a lifelong passion for one simple reason, which is that she never stopped. She is sixteen, turning seventeen, and across every stage of that long run she has treated each new medium as another way to sharpen how she tells a story in images.

Building blocks

Her earliest serious work was in graphite, drawing fan art of her favourite kpop idols in the years before the pandemic. At the time it was pure enthusiasm, a way to spend time inside her own interests, and only later did she recognise how much it was teaching her about observation and shading. As her confidence grew she moved outward into acrylic, watercolour, and coloured pencil, and each one handed her a different lesson in colour, texture, and composition. Then she found oil pastels, and their vibrant colour and thick, rich texture made them her favourite traditional medium almost at once. They still hold that place, though most of her pieces now are mixed-medium, pulling several materials into the same frame.

Going digital

Digital art entered the picture during the pandemic, back in 2020, and the switch was harder than she expected. Working in an entirely different format meant relearning techniques she thought she had already mastered, but she stuck with it, and over time digital became her primary medium for the plain reasons that it is accessible and endlessly versatile.

Where it comes from

Inspiration reaches her from nearly everything. Nature, ordinary interactions, music, different cultures, and the work of other artists all feed the way she sees. One name stands out among them, Hirohiko Araki, the creator of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, whose work she studied closely and reinterpreted through fan art. Doing so deepened her grasp of colour theory, proportion, and dynamic composition, and it is a large part of why she now reaches for the more unconventional choices in her own pieces.

Making the overlooked visible

Underneath the range of mediums runs a clear intention. Ikshika is drawn to what usually gets overlooked, and she is especially interested in representing people and cultures while building stories that have not been told yet. She wants her work to celebrate diversity and to make familiar subjects feel new again, holding to the belief that art can be a genuine tool for visibility and connection.

Always evolving

If there is one thing that defines her work, it is that it refuses to stand still. She does not hold to a single fixed style, and instead lets it shift and change with every piece she makes. The techniques and the visual influences move around freely, but a few things never leave: her love of dramatic colour, her appetite for texture, and her commitment to representation stay steady no matter how much else transforms. Looking ahead, she wants to keep widening both her skill and her understanding of the world through the work.

Sixteen, turning seventeen, with a body of work that has no fixed address and one unmistakable signature: colour, turned all the way up.