Play Art! A new Indian art-based creative app for kids

Team L&M

After the popularity of their illustrated storybooks, indie children’s publisher Mama Suranya Books has announced the launch of Play Art – an Indian art based colouring and stickers app for children of 6 to 9 years.

A creative and educational app, Play Art is the answer for parents looking for children’s activities associated with Indian art and music. The app’s colouring pages and stickers are from Mama Suranya Books’ illustrated storybooks and folk art colouring books to encourage children to move seamlessly between the books and digital space. Based on Mama Suranya Books’ stories, the app’s sticker games feature India’s iconic trees and birds like banyans, peepals, mango trees, gulmohars, peacocks, parrots and eagles. The painting games include folk art colouring pages by practicing master craftsmen of Rajasthani Phad and Madhubani art. Most of the app’s colourful graphics, buttons and icons are hand-drawn, giving them an organic feel, so that children get a rich visual experience.

A unique feature of Play Art is its audio score. The app gets a classical touch with the use of musical pieces composed especially for Play Art by Ustad Arif Ali Khan, sarangi maestro of the renowned Kairana Gharana of Hindustani classical music. The app also features tabla beats, the call of peacocks, koels and parrots, splashing water, children laughing while playing gilli danda and other delightful audio touches. In this way, as with Mama Suranya Books’ stories, the idea of Play Art app is to engage children with Indian art and landscape in a light and playful way.

Keeping in mind parental concerns, Play Art is completely ad-free. The app is free to install with plenty of enjoyable free colouring pages and stickers to play with. In addition, there are some paid colouring pages and stickers offered as optional in-app purchases at extremely attractive prices ranging from Rs 10 to Rs 80. Play Art is designed and conceived by Suranya Aiyar, who is the author-illustrator of Mama Suranya Books, an independent Indian children’s publication. The stories in Mama Suranya Books are inspired by India’s iconic trees, birds and animals; its festivals, legends and arts; and the stuff of everyday life in the author’s city of Delhi, like the long, hot summer, the joy of the monsoon, and the love of mangoes.