Today is an admin day at Swedish school so no school for me! What should I do with all this new free time? Wake up really early and go to Creative Mornings!

Creative Mornings is a worldwide group (find your city here) meeting once a month to hear inspiring talks from local creatives. All the talks get put up on their website so you can hear with creatives in San Francisco or Berlin or Sydney think about a wide range of topics. This month’s topic is Ink so the Malmö chapter invited three inspiring illustrators to speak and answer questions on why ink is an important medium.  Oh, and there’s coffee and treats and, this morning, temporary tattoos, too! I connected most with the work of Tovelisa, who has done a bunch of awesome illustrations for Granit and also has a coloring book for adults (I love this idea!) coming out soon. You can find her work for sale here.

When you talk about ink, I think, you also have to talk about the opposite of ink. Which, right now, feels like it might be digital. As if ink is old media and digital is the new frontier where all your mistakes are a command+z away from perfection. But of course, it’s knowing how and when to use each that can make the most beautiful result. The very first architectural firm I worked for out of collage strongly encouraged starting all designs on paper and trace with ink first. It all felt like such a waste of time to me! Shouldn’t we get to the doing part? No one’s going to see the ink stuff so I felt like we should just start blocking things out in the design program and work up from there so as not to waste time. But they were right. Something gets lost, creativity slips away, when you can press delete so easily. Or worse, you go down a rabbit hole of how some little command works or that’s not the right thickness of line and how do I change it and what’s that new cool feature that is suppose to make everything better and how is it used? Before you notice an hour has gone by and you better well have something ready to present. Oops. So ink is a better start. I think it’s wonderful to find out how that new feature works, and maybe it will be really awesome, but when you need to create something ink is better. When I work I don’t want anything between me and getting all the creativeness out. If it comes out wrong, I can fix it later in that fancy design program, but first I have to get the creative out.

Sitting in front of a blank piece of paper with an (old) pen in your hand is a bit daunting. The only thing between you and a realization of creativity is ink. And maybe that’s better.

// what to do this weekend

another beautiful diy clay-as-ceramic piece. Now with more CHEESE!

craft up a spring time wreath

daydream of a coffee and food filled trip through Lucerne, Switzerland