“I feel like my hand has a soul and memory of its own. It draws things I didn’t know were going on in my head or I knew how to draw,” says Khyati Trehan who is right now interning with the Think Tank Team of Samsung Research, led by Pranav Mistry, in Silicon Valley, California. She is studying Graphic Design at National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad.

She refers to her sketchbook as more of an idea book. She considers it a way to think aloud and a substitute for brainstorming with a group of people. “Because one thing leads to another in sketches and you see connections instead of just thinking about them,” she adds. Sometimes sketching is also a leisurely activity for her as she draws people and places around her.

She says that most of the work in her sketchbook is quite different from one another and she doesn’t have a style yet. “It compliments what I’m trying to do as a student, which is exploring all possible nooks and crannies of visual communication before I settle on one (But secretly, I don’t really want to settle on only one). Though, having interned under Rajesh Dahiya of Codesign and Satya Rajpurohit of The Indian Type Foundry, it’s difficult to not be partial to type drawing and lettering,” she says.

For most of her sketches, Trehan relies on pen, pencil and paper but switches to digital media such as Photoshop and Wacom for practical purposes. “If I have to send a sketch over to someone, it makes more sense than sketching on paper and scanning. But the freedom you get with pen and paper isn’t there with the laptop,” she says.

Here are some of her sketches.