CraftCanvas

CraftCanvas CraftCanvas partners with artisan communities across the country in developing home decor products and services and promoting handicrafts through workshops

The initial idea for CraftCanvas was drawn in Feb 2011 and it was formally set up in June 2011. I am an engineer and a MBA in Marketing. I am currently pursuing a Diploma course in Interior Design. In my corporate experience I have worked in sales and marketing roles for a couple of MNCs in India. Since 2009, I’ve been actively involved in the handicrafts sector. CraftCanvas is a result of my lov

e for ‘all things handmade’ and my experience in sales and marketing. I live in Ahmedabad in an almost handcrafted home, with a forest in my balcony! I am here to offer you a hundred percent handcrafted experience. I’ll help you move into a handmade home. Come, explore!

11/05/2026

Mata Ni Pachedi is traditionally used to create portable shrines, cloth temples that could be carried to where the goddess was needed.
For 'In Her Own Time', we asked what happens when the shrine is not for worship but for rest.
The installation is a tunnel. Hand-painted and digitally printed textiles on all sides, drawn from the visual language of Mata Ni Pachedi, the arches, the borders and the hierarchy of the sacred. You walk through it slowly. The passage narrows your pace whether you intend it to or not.
At the end is the sanctum sanctorum. Bolsters on the floor. A large hand-painted Mata Ni Pachedi panel of the goddess by Sanjaybhai Chitara. All ambient temple music and controlled light.
The question the installation asks: who gets to rest? Under what conditions? What does it mean for a woman to claim time that belongs entirely to her?
We think of mothers first as givers. Givers of time, of food, of presence, of self, of everything. Rest, for a woman, is what happens after everyone else is taken care of. If it happens at all.
This installation disagrees. It makes rest the destination, not the remainder.
As shown at Abhivyakti Edition 7, 2025, Ahmedabad. Curated by
Artisan: Sanjaybhai Chitara ( )

03/05/2026

28 days from brief to installation.

That is not how craft works. Except this time, it did because the client asked for it.

The brief was simple: something nature-related, and ready in time for their opening.

This is the Sohrai mural we made for Taj Tadoba, in one of India's tiger reserves.

Sohrai is a wall painting tradition from Jharkhand. It is made during the harvest festival when women paint the walls of their homes with images of animals, forests, and the natural world from a grammar that has been passed down without interruption for centuries.

The brief and the tradition were a natural match.

One might argue that twenty-eight days is not enough time to commission craft, at least in the way most people understand commissioning.

What made it possible was the absence of the things that usually slow a project down- the approval chains, the revision loops, and the time it takes for a studio and their client to align.

The architect team made decisions quickly and with confidence. We have a 12 years + working relationship with the architects. So we were aligned right from the word go and we able to bring designs that were ready to approve.

The rest was the artisans.

Adam Christopher Imam. Alka Imam. Diwakar Indwar. Pramila Kiran Lakra. Usha Panna.

Five Sohrai artists who carried a harvest tradition into a wildlife reserve.

Design team: Udit Parekh, Roshni Adarsh
Made in collaboration with (.sairam)

01/05/2026

So proud to be featured alongside
fisher.fineart

thegoldenbrandco

michescotthandmade




()watts de.loom

What Women Create is a quarterly publication celebrating women makers across the world.

29/04/2026

Gond painting began as songs sung by Gond Pardhans for generations.
From there, they moved to the walls of their homes. It has since travelled, to canvas, to paper, to ceramic, to fabric, to the walls of hotels and offices and cultural institutions across the country. Every time it moves to a new surface, it reveals something new about itself.
This time it is on light.
A lighting installation for an office, currently in progress in our studio. The Gond motifs with the characteristic layered lines, the fish, the birds, the trees rendered in the visual logic of the Gondi worldview will sit on a surface that glows from behind.
The light changes what the eye does with the image. In natural light, you read the pattern. In the installation's own light, maybe the pattern reads you.
This is what we mean when we say Gond travels.
It is not a decorative tradition that can be applied to surfaces. It is a visual language complete enough to find meaning on any surface it encounters, be it mud wall, paper, canvas, light.
Put it anywhere. It will make sense.
Team: , ,

27/04/2026

The Andhari river runs through Tadoba National Park.
It is the lifeline of the forest, the tigers come to it, deer come to it, the crocodiles and the star turtles that swim in it, every creature in the park orients around it. We made it the spine of this mural.
I hope everyone who stands here hears the sound of the river.
Made in collaboration with ,
Artisans: ,
Design team: , ,
Made for Taj Tadoba Resort & Soa, Nagpur.

20/04/2026

Vummidi Bangaru Chetty is one of the oldest jewellery houses in India.
Growing up in Chennai, I had peered into the store every time I passed it. I never had the courage to step inside that kind of grandeur. The diamond jewellery in the display seemed like something made for goddesses.
Turns out, it was.
The brief was a divine wedding scene. The client wanted the sacred and the celebratory together. In the Indian context, this is not a contradiction, it is the definition of a wedding.
Tanjore painting was the first instinct. But Tanjore, for all its devotional richness, is a single-figure tradition. We needed a composition, a full scene with movement, narrative, multiple figures in relationship with each other. Pattachitra offered that. A sacred narrative tradition from Odisha, used for centuries to tell the stories of gods on cloth and palm leaf with extraordinary density and precision.
We took our references from literature on the Chozha dynasty, including my favorite Ponniyin Selvan, which I used this project as an excuse to re-read.
The panels were hand-illustrated by in Pattachitra style. The goddesses and divine figures sit behind the jewellery displays, not just as backdrop but also as context. In a store where jewellery has always been made for weddings, for temples, for rites of passage, the art and the product are making the same argument.
That what is offered here is not merely beautiful. It is significant.
And when you wear this jewellery on your wedding day, may you have the divine blessings and the everlasting love that our art signifies.
Made in collaboration with for

10/04/2026

In 2010, Amit Dutta made a film called Nainsukh.
There is a scene where a king is being shaved. That is all that is happening. A barber. A blade. A king sitting still.
In almost every court painting tradition in India, kings are painted at war, at hunt, at court. Heroic, formal, monumental. Nainsukh, an 18th century painter from the Pahari tradition, painted his patron Balwant Singh being shaved. Waking up. Writing letters. Watching a thunderstorm.
The inane made art. The ordinary made permanent.
This is what made Nainsukh radical in his time and contemporary in ours. Restraint in a tradition that rewarded spectacle. Intimacy in a format built for grandeur. A peacock peeking from behind architecture in a composition that could have been filled with ornamentation.
When we worked on the Museum of Meenakari Heritage in Jaipur, it was Nainsukh's approach that guided how we approached the problem. Traditional that is also contemporary. His quality of line, his relationship to architectural space, the way he used the edges of a composition to suggest a world continuing beyond the frame.
The way he documented a moment, photographing a point of time.
That distinction matters more now than it did in the 18th century. We are drowning in heroic imagery, in narcissism at every corner. Everything is curated, everything is monumental, everything screaming importance.
Nainsukh painted a man lost in thought as he smokes a ho**ah. He made it poignant.
Watch Amit Dutta's film. Then look at the Pahari miniatures again. You will not see them the same way.

Photo courtesy: All images were sourced online.

P.S: I hope to showcase the background work that goes into what we do. It is thoroughly academic, it borrows from other mediums and arts and it is never linear. And while we are not one for showcasing the final work often, it is only because it pales in comparison to the richness of the process.

24/03/2026

M.C. Escher spent his life arranging shapes that tile a surface perfectly, no gaps, no overlaps, figures that transform into each other across the plane. Sanjhi is a paper cutting tradition from Mathura that has been doing something structurally similar for centuries, building images entirely from what is removed.
We brought these two traditions into the same room. Ashutosh Verma, a 6th generation Sanjhi artisan with a longstanding interest in where his tradition can go, translated Escher's tessellation logic into paper cut form. Every interlocking shape had to be cut with the precision the tradition already demands, except now the shapes had to tile mathematically, not just visually.
The result is a body of work that neither tradition could have made alone.
In collaboration with , and .

19/03/2026

They don't call it art. They call it prayer.
Mata Ni Pachedi is a sacred cloth painting tradition from Gujarat. The Chitara family of Ahmedabad are its sole practitioners , a lineage that has carried this tradition for generations, painting the stories of the mother goddess on fabric for her devotees.
There is a rule. No one's feet may touch the piece. Not while it is being made, not while it is drying.
We were on the riverbank in Ahmedabad, drying a large piece made for the Chief Minister's Office, Gandhinagar. Sanjaybhai and Vasantbhai Chitara had washed it in the river, the traditional way the dyes are fixed, and laid it out on the grass to dry in the sun.
A shepherd came by with his flock.
Without a word, all the artisans moved to the fabric and lifted the entire length off the ground. Held it in the air until the sheep had passed.
So that even the animals' feet wouldn't touch it.
I have worked with many craft traditions over 15 years. I have never forgotten that moment. It told me everything about what this work means to the people who make it and therefore what it must mean to the people who commission it.
Artisans: .m.chitara and Vasant Chitara, Ahmedabad. Mata Ni Pachedi installation for the Chief Minister's Office, Gandhinagar, Gujarat.

At CraftCanvas, people come first.Whether it’s our artisans, design partners, or even our logistics team, collaboration ...
24/02/2025

At CraftCanvas, people come first.
Whether it’s our artisans, design partners, or even our logistics team, collaboration is at the heart of everything we do. When asked about scaling up, our response is simple: anything that takes us away from being fully immersed in every micro-phase of our projects is not a path we choose. Our work demands—and receives—our full attention.
P.C for the first photo (), our forever friend and mentor.

Mass production creates sameness. Craft creates uniqueness. When you buy from a mass-produced brand, someone else has th...
20/02/2025

Mass production creates sameness. Craft creates uniqueness.

When you buy from a mass-produced brand, someone else has the exact same thing. But with handmade, no two pieces are ever identical—because the human hand never repeats itself perfectly.

In our project, crafted in partnership with , we embroidered over 3 lakh circles across 59 panels, and yet, not a single one was identical. That’s the beauty of craftsmanship.

This isn’t just luxury—it’s luxury at its zenith. The kind that can never be replicated.

Would you rather own something perfectly identical or imperfectly unique? Drop your thoughts below! 👇

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#3, GoodEarth Tarana, Malhar Road, Near ACS College Of Engineering Kambipura Vil
Bangalore
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