A world I'm drawing for myself

28 October 2026

I’ve never been good at introductions. Give me a blank page and I’ll go for hours. Ask me to say who I am out loud and I go quiet. So I’ll keep this simple. I’m Urvashi. Toxiciink is the name I gave to something that started long before it had one. For years it was just me, a sketchbook, and whatever I couldn’t say out loud. Then the sketchbooks piled up and the wall behind my desk ran out of space. Somewhere in there it stopped being a habit and became the thing I’m building my life around. I’m a gothic artist. I didn’t pick the word. It found me after I’d already filled pages with skulls wearing roses, moons that weep, and women who look like they know something you don’t. To me, gothic isn’t about being dark for the sake of it. It’s about finding beauty in the places people look away from. The decay, the grief, the quiet, the things we’re taught to hide. A rose means more when it grows out of a skull. Light means more when you’ve had to drag it out of the dark. That’s what I keep coming back to, the tension between something soft and something that scares you, sitting on the same page. It’s also why I only work in black and white. Gothic art lives in contrast, and ink is the most honest way I know to show it. No colour to soften anything. No eraser to take it back. Every dot is a decision. Every mistake stays and becomes part of the piece. A little morbid, a little tender, and entirely mine. Why this page exists:) The shop is where the finished things live. Originals, prints, stickers, hand-inked bookmarks. But the finished piece is only the last bit of the story. The half-drawn pages, the ideas that didn’t work, the reason I was still awake at 2 a.m., none of that ever gets seen. This is where it goes. I also want to be honest about the other half of it, the part nobody puts on a grid. I’m building Toxiciink as I go, and I’m learning most of it the hard way. How to price work. How to pack a print so it survives the post. How to talk about my own art without shrinking while I do it. I’m going to get plenty of it wrong. I’d rather tell you when I do than act like I had a plan the whole time. So this page gets the good days and the bad calls, written the same way. What I really want is a small world of my own where I get to make whatever I want. A portrait one week, a wall-sized mural the next, a bookmark inked by hand, or something I haven’t thought of yet. Nobody gets to tell me it has to fit a niche. It’s ink, and whatever it turns into. And I want this to work, more than I usually admit out loud. I want to wake up and know that drawing is the job, not the thing I squeeze in after it. I want someone in a city I’ve never been to to hang my work on their wall and feel something. Every print that leaves my desk, every message from someone who gets it, is proof that it’s possible. I’m not in a hurry, but I’m not letting go either. I don’t fully know what that world looks like yet. I’m working it out the way I draw. Start in the centre, don’t stop, and trust that the shape turns up. If you’re reading this, you’re early. Pull up a chair. There’s ink on everything. Urvashi Toxiciink