Buongiorno! Today, we are leaving Tuscany and we are off to our next travels and work-cations. That makes me feel a little nostalgic, but also happy for what’s coming next. This area full of green hills, beautiful vegetation and old houses has been quite inspiring and refuelling for our creativity.
My mother, who travelled with us, is a true artist. On the first day we arrived in the region, she decided to go buy a sketchbook and some water colors, and has been sketching and painting quick landscapes of the area every day. It was as if she wanted to create small captures and collect some memorabilia with her own strokes. This inspired me, as her practice seemed like such a great way to connect with the place itself.
You can try to capture a place and a memory with photographs, but drawing is even more powerful as it takes a bit more dedication and it’s something you do with your own hands.
This tickled my mind, so I decided to give it a try as well! I grabbed my sketchbook just for the fun of it, took a photograph of Tuscany as a reference, and started drawing. It took me several hours to finish this illustration and I even had to spread it over a few days, which is actually a little unusual for me as most of the stuff that I have been doing lately is rather quick. My calm state of mind and the mood of the weekend allowed me to actually focus more on the details this time. I carefully structured my drawing, prepared some outlines really delicately to then spend a lot of time getting lost into a sea of dotting, strokes and tiny details.
Let me be brutally honest for a moment: while I was doing it, I was constantly somewhere between a state of euphoria (hmm, this feels relaxing) and a state of anxiety (I’m so going to f*ck this up). It’s really strange. I wonder what the heck this is supposed to mean.
Anyway! I am actually quite happy with the result despite that. I decided to combine my illustration with my hand lettering and compose it into a minimal layout. It now represents this very moment, when we are just about to leave Tuscany to our next adventure, simply captured as a memory! It feels like we are now ready to continue to a next chapter.
What do you think?
