I absolutely adore the work of Sanna Annukka. Just look at her Maidens of the Midnight Sun or the three-prints set below. Puts a spin on the creative mind (which I really need today, Monday morning and all).

Ok, so I have a dilemma. It’s something that I think about daily, and it affects every aspect of my life. It’s something that I need to get sorted out to be able to settle down and relax, and before I do it will consume most of my thoughts during the non-work hours. Here’s the thing: my heart and soul is in Sydney. This wouldn’t be a problem if my family and close friends were too, or at least at a “normal” distance from Sydney. But they’re not. They’re all 24 hours from Sydney, in Scandinavia.
I really can’t stand the weather and darkness in Scandinavia and I really can’t stand living on the other side of the world from my family and friends.
Hence: the dilemma.

I’ve lived in Australia for 2 years, 1.5 of them in Sydney, and I’ve never felt happier or more “at home”. It’s hard to explain, but as soon as I set my foot in Sydney I instantly loved it. The atmosphere, the people, the nature and surroundings, the climate - it all made perfect sense. I couldn’t for the life of me understand how people could actually choose to live somewhere other than Australia. I was, and am still, convinced that most of my friends and family members would choose to live in Australia if they tried it and could bring their loved ones with them. I tore my hair in agony over the fact that I couldn’t convince a single one of them to actually give it a try.

A year and a half later and I’m back in Sweden. It’s amazing to see everyone again and I realize how much I’ve missed them all. I wouldn’t for the world want to leave them again.
But still.
I suddenly find myself being more irritated, tired and gloomy. I let small things bother me again. It takes me four hours to wake up in the morning instead of one. I don’t have the energy to be happy, and feel too annoyed to be able to relax.

So what do you choose?

After pondering night and day for months and months, I’ve realized that there actually is a solution, even though it’s a hard-to-reach one. We could live in Sydney January-April every year and Stockholm May-December. It could actually work, job wise, since both of us have professions that allows us to freelance, but there are many, many obstacles to overcome before we could actually make this happen. One of the big ones is housing. We own an apartment in Stockholm, but we’re not allowed to sublet it for a few months every year. We’re (unfortunately) not rich, so we can’t buy an apartment in Sydney as well and just move back and forth as we please. We would have to look for rental apartments once a year in Stockholm and once a year in Sydney, and wouldn’t be able to own more stuff than we could carry on the plane back and forth. It seems like an impossible situation, but I’m determined to make this happen somehow. It seems like the only solution to me.

Well, that’s my dilemma. Maybe I should spend less time dwelling and more time working towards making it happen (read: make lots of money, fast)

One of my favourite designers is Ian Bilbey. I particularly love his work for Paul Smith. Colourful, naive vector art at its best.

Little boat big ocean, available as mounted print, poster, laminated print, framed print, canvas print and card.

Now you can buy some of my illustrations and other stuff as wall art or cards at Redbubble. Most of them are available as laminated prints, mounted prints, posters, framed prints, canvas prints and postcards.

The first one is called Bring a little bit of colour into this world

My beautiful, precious MacBook Pro has crashed! It just kept freezing up, and after a while it died… I’ve had it for 1,5 years, so it’s not even old. I’m one of those annoying Apple-adoring people who switched to Mac and immediately realized that I am so the Mac guy in the commercials and I can’t believe I’ve been working on ugly, stiff PCs for years and years! I’ve been boasting about my MacBook, laughing at my fiancé’s heavy black PC and talking for hours about the superiority of all Macs to PCs. And what happens? My beloved, shiny, silvery MacBook crashes, while my fiancé’s brick of a PC - which cost half as much - lives on through the years.

I’m truly disappointed. And with no guarantee I’m guessing it will cost about as much to get it repaired as it would to buy a new one.

The same day it happened, I got an email from Apple promoting the new, slimlined, ultrathin MacBook Air.
Coincidence? Hm…

 (Picture from Apple store)

I’m back in Stockholm, ready to take on lots of fun freelance projects! First of all, I really should start looking into customizing the template of this Wordpress blog to better fit in with the rest of my website…

Blogging again is a bit weird, especially in English. I used to have a blog in Swedish about interior design - lots of fun, but very time consuming. Hopefully I will have time to update this blog regularly, as soon as I get into it all… I’m planning to write bits and pieces about life as a freelancing graphic designer and beautiful design that inspire me. You’ll have to bare with me during this start-up period and my far-from-perfect English skills.