Eggs-quisite art: This artist embellishes eggshells with drawings and decorative materials

Jijin S Kumar's WhatsApp display picture shows him proudly holding up a certificate testifying that he holds the "world record" for "making the most number of holes in eggshell without any break". The 24-year-old resident of Thiruvalla town in Kerala, one of just a handful of egg artists in India, has made 7,500 holes in a single hen’s egg, the smallest, no bigger than a pinhead.

And that's not the most difficult piece that Kumar has made. There's one that resembles a cradle with a child sleeping in a bed of soft down and is screened by four heart-shaped flaps. The cradle, clearly, is one half of an eggshell — this one, larger than a hen's egg, is from the Rhea bird, a large flightless bird like the ostrich and emu, found mostly in South America — while the other half has been carefully cut into the flaps. Gold thread trimmings and delicately etched drawings of rose bouquets in mauve tones complete the piece, which exudes an aura of innocence and peace. "It's the girl child, who is precious and whom we need to keep protected inside our hearts," says Kumar, who works as an optometrist in the

Believers Church and Medical Hospital in Thiruvalla by day, and practices on his egg art-skills by night, sometimes working right into the early hours of the morning.

It was a chance photograph that he saw on social media that piqued Kumar's interest in this very delicate art form. The first experiments he made were with his mother's safety pin — "But the shell broke," Kumar says laughing.

"In fact, I broke 42 eggs before I made my first piece." That was six years ago.

And now, Kumar is a member of the Encyclopedia of World Egg Artists, his handiwork has been selected to feature on the logo of the International Egg Art Association — only 33 artists are chosen for the honour — and he has had several solo shows across Kerala where he has sold his works, priced between `2,000 and `35,000. He also has several international clients, and that ensures a steady supply of commissions.

Remarkably, Kumar has learnt egg art entirely on his own. Not just were there no people around him who practised the art, but very few, except for his mother, sister and a few friends, understood what he was doing, and didn't ridicule him. "In the beginning, I even worked with lizard eggs! I was aided hugely by the experts in egg art, including Helena Kim Ju, president of the World Egg Art Association, whom I found on Facebook. They were kind enough to look at my work, point out mistakes, suggest improvements and show me new techniques," says Kumar. Egg artists from Uzbekistan, whom he met and befriended on social media, taught him the art of making Pysanky, the beautiful Uzbek Easter eggs, and even sent him the special dyes and a special stylus called Kistka that is used to make them. It is from another friend, a Chinese egg artist called Kim Juvan, that Kumar is learning his next difficult trick — that of inserting five to six eggs, one inside the other, without breaking the shell.

For all this help, however, Kumar has had to make do with whatever local tools — mostly needles and surgical blades — he could modify to work on this delicate art. The ones used by artists in the West are just too expensive. Thankfully, eggshells, even the exotic ones such as ostrich and emu that Kumar favours, are easier to source, since these birds are grown commercially in farms across India. But they too aren't cheap, costing anywhere from `800 to `8,000. It doesn't deter Kumar, of course — "Egg art is my passion," he says.