Dhwani Saraiya started turning Philly athletes into superheroes. Then she caught the attention of fans — and some big names.

Dhwani Saraiya wasn’t raised a Philly sports fan. In fact, she remembers her home in Edison, N.J., sporting Mets gear as she grew up. By chance, Saraiya, in search of something new to watch after the end of March Madness, stumbled onto a 76ers-Celtics game. If not for the Sixers’ 2018 City Edition jerseys, she might be a Celtics fan.

OK, maybe that’s a bridge too far, but she saw the jerseys and was hooked.

She quickly found artistic inspiration through Sixers basketball. Saraiya started drawing in high school, when she would sketch her favorite comic book heroes during class. She loved the look of old-school comic pages, with the halftone pattern and signs of weathering.

“When you have those high-tension moments at the end of games, it’s almost like superheroes,” Saraiya told The Inquirer. “If you look at [Joel] Embiid and his game-winners, it’s like the same emotion as a comic book hero.”

Saraiya, 26, started posting her art on X to a modest following. But now she has become one of the biggest sports artists in Philadelphia, with a mural at Citizens Bank Park and athletes like Nick Castellanos and Nick Foles celebrating her work.

Saraiya has been wowing Philly Twitter since she started posting her art on the social media platform now known as X. But don’t take it from us. Take it from Foles.

“This is pretty awesome,” Foles said after the Eagles presented him with a custom print by Saraiya in honor of his retirement. “This is pretty special. … This is truly a special work of art that encompasses so much of that game and my career.”

In January 2020, Saraiya posted a few colored pencil drawings she’d made of the Sixers to her Twitter account, which quickly blew up and earned thousands of interactions — including a reply from the Sixers.

Before that, she’d been posting for a small group of friends on the platform and hadn’t yet realized the full scope of Philly sports fans online. At that point, she still was primarily a Sixers fan.

“As I started posting more and I became friends with a lot more people, [people kept saying] ‘You should do Phillies art!’ or ‘Do Eagles art!’” Saraiya said. “I just started doing that, and then I became a fan that way. By association, I became a Philly sports fan.”

She’s built a huge community of friends and supporters through her artwork on social media, including athletes like Castellanos and Tobias Harris, Sixers president Daryl Morey, and, most recently, Foles.

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Since her first foray into comic-inspired drawing, Saraiya said her style has shifted and she focuses more on illustration to make her drawings look more like a piece of art than a comic book illustration.

Nowadays, Saraiya doesn’t need to come up with too many of her own ideas. Anytime something exciting happens in Philly sports, fans are tagging her and asking her to draw it.

“Any moment that really resonates with our fan base, that’s what I like,” Saraiya said. “That’s the inspiration, but sometimes I also try to take inspiration from old things … taking people back into history and then combining it with the current state of our sports.”

One of her most popular pieces is an illustration inspired by the Sports Illustrated cover from 2011, featuring then-Phillies pitchers Roy Halladay, Cole Hamels, Joe Blanton, Cliff Lee, and Roy Oswalt. Saraiya edited the cover to include the current Phillies rotation of Zack Wheeler, Aaron Nola, Ranger Suárez, and Cristopher Sánchez.

Saraiya draws most of her work on Procreate, using her iPad, but she’ll often sketch out design ideas by hand on paper. She also draws with colored pencils and has a “top-secret journal” of ideas that may or may not make it into her Etsy store one day.

“I always try to add some texture or weathering or whatever it be onto my stuff because I think it gives more of a warmth to it,” Saraiya said. “It looks cool. It looks a lot different than your standard sports posters.”

On Tuesday, Saraiya, who now lives in Metuchen, N.J., took her parents to their first-ever baseball game — and to see her biggest project to date, her City Connect mural at Citizens Bank Park.

“I think that might be my peak,” Saraiya said. “It’s the biggest thing, physically, but also just going from drawing pictures and posting them on Twitter to having something that you made in a baseball stadium of your favorite team that people pass through every day. It’s insane. I remember the day that it went up, I was with my friend, and we got to go earlier before the gates open, and just look at it, and I was just so starstruck by seeing that in person.”

The Phillies reached out to Saraiya to work on the mural after she posted a drawing of Bryce Harper in the leaked City Connect jerseys — “They were like, ‘She might be able to change people’s minds about the jerseys.’”

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As an Indian American, the common stereotype is to pursue medicine or computer science, not to go into the arts, Saraiya said. Her parents are musicians and were always supportive of her artistic ambitions, but some others in her family were more hesitant about her following that passion. She considered studying graphic design in college, but ultimately decided to major in communications at Rutgers and pursue drawing on the side.

Since then, her artwork has blown up beyond her wildest expectations.

“In year four or five now, and now we’re really getting through to them,” Saraiya said. “In the beginning, it was a bit iffy, because I was just doing it by myself and posting stuff, but now I think they realize that, ‘Oh, she’s serious about this.’ Even if they don’t, I don’t do anything for their approval. If they like it, that’s cool. If they don’t, that’s cool, too. I know I’ve got my friends with me, and I’ve got the best fan base in the world with me, so we’re good.”