You Don't Do This Enough!
Advice for young and emerging artists and illustrators. Recaps time! As expected, April was full of events and emotions. This is how it went!
April was an amazing month full of events and artistic inspiration! I had a great time at Playgrounds in Eindhoven, where I connected with many of you and discussed your artwork and creative passions. I got some insight into what illustrated merch sells well and I’m gonna share it with you. The festival left me feeling inspired!
Our Planet Week just finished and I'm delighted that so many artists participated despite the obstacles on Instagram. I even tried my hand at simple 2D animation for the first time during the event! Keep on reading
Finally, get ready for Bon Voyage Week, another exciting illustration challenge! More details below
The Menu for This Week
🌳 Advice for artists and illustrators
🌳 Art Challenge ending
🌳 Art Challenge starting
We Are Playgrounds
Having fun at Playgrounds
2 days full of art, inspiring talks, demos, creative tech, and chat. Those of you who visited Playgrounds in Eindhoven this year know how cool the event was!
First of all, huge thanks to all of you who came by my booth to say hi and chat! It was definitely the highlight of the event for me, to be able to get to know you, even so briefly, and learn about your art, creative passions, and skills you’ve been pursuing. It’s always amazing to put a face to your IG Presence and the other way around. I hope to see you again at some art event or market in the future. There were many familiar faces that I had met last year!
I know many of you are interested in the art market scene, as you take part in them yourselves, so I’ll share some things over here, as my YouTube vid from the Playgrounds (watch above!) was made from a different, not so much art market-oriented, angle.
In short, the second day, Friday, was significantly calmer than the first one, where the crowds were crazy! Overall, I brought 150 business cards and ran out of almost all of them! If I learned one thing about illustration merch is that people are absolutely obsessed with stickers! Sticker sales were celebrated at every stand; the contemplation of which ones to choose and the deliberation before each sticker purchase was endearing.
So, Art market sellers, add some cool illustrated stickers to your merch, and you’ll be golden! Another cool thing was to see the variety of totes made and offered by different artists, and it makes me so so happy to have seen so many of you sporting my Tiger Tote inside and outside of the venue.
After participating in Playgrounds Fest, I felt inspired, which, if you ask me, is the ultimate goal of any art-related event. To keep the inspiration flowing, I’ve been rewatching the replays of last year’s talks & interviews to keep me company while working at my desk, digging out older interviews and illustration process videos from my fave artists on YouTube as well. Learning about other artists’ practices and experiences has been invaluable and motivating, but more on that soon.
In case you haven’t seen it yet, I made a short impression on my YouTube from the Festival experience about the importance of events, such as this one, for artists.
Our Planet Week
Our 4th edition just ended!
I can’t believe it’s already been the 4th year we’ve been making art during Our Planet Week together! I’m so moved that so many artists joined us, in spite of a big barrier that Instagram, the platform where Our Planet Week event was born, has been building in between us, cutting our reach and hiding our posts from each other. We even had the youngest participant in OPW's history, an 8-year-old artist; see her work below.
This edition of Our Planet Week was a special one for me because I challenged myself and branched a bit more from my usual illustration work. A goal of mine for a very long time was to take the first steps in simple 2D animation. You might notice here that my goal wasn’t even to “learn” or “master” animation but just to give it a go. Try it, see for myself if I enjoy it, do something different, and give another dimension to my illustrations. For many reasons, inconveniences, “lack of time,” but mostly fear, I was constantly pushing this idea away and procrastinating.
And so when Our Planet Week got closer, I decided that now was a perfect moment to do so. I prepared five simple illustrations. For some reason, I don’t like working chronologically; my natural rebellion against numbers. I started working on the last prompt first, leaving for the end first one, “Ecosystem.” It actually worked out pretty well for me because when the time came to create the first illu, I already knew some very basic rules of simple animation.
As a result, the first illustration I created and animated is my favorite one, and the last one, “Habitat”, wasn’t even posted on my feed, only in stories, as it was so bad:) I’m hoping to make a short video of my Our Planet Week pieces with their animated background, we will see how it goes!
Last but not least, huge thanks to the amazing team of artists that helped prepare the challenge, kept you company along the way, and created awesome art themselves! I wanted to give a huge Thank you to my amazing 2023 hosting team; everyone was incredible and did a fantastic job! A special shout-out to:
Karla, for being such an engaged and involved host @karlasandersart
Nina, who hosted the event for the first time and did a great job @janinarossiter
Stefan, for his super informative posts; thank you for educating us all @styngvi
Meg for engaging so much with all the participants! @megbudart
Thank you so much, guys! And huge applause to our partner, One Tree Planted, for supporting the initiative! Very soon, I’ll let you guys know how many trees we managed to add to our Planet together this year!
Bon Voyage Week
Another exciting challenge!
If you love illustration, travels & challenges, be ready for Bon Voyage Week! All the challenge details and itineraries have already been announced over on my Instagram. Together in a cozy squad of awesome illustrators, we’ll be traveling wherever we want to, thanks to our art. It’s also the 4th edition for this one, and I warmly invite you to join us, as over those years, I’ve seen artists creating some truly incredible art during this challenge.
Look for the illustration of Mugo, the little bat, on my IG feed for all the details and info you need! I hope to see you over at #bonvoyageweek2023!
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