Back from Berlin

You may or may not have noticed but I have been in Berlin for 4 days. A sudden, unexpected and definately inspiring trip! For two days we went to the Pictoplasma Festival where we saw a lot of great character design by great illustrators, artists and designers. And we saw a lot of animations which were funny, beautiful, cute, endearing, scary, weird, amazing and sometimes psychedelic.

Here are some random pictures I took on our trip. I'll be posting more this week about my trip.

Pictoplasma

This weekend I will be attending the Pictoplasma festival in Berlin. My friend Marlène invited me out of the blue to come along. How great is that!! So I'm checking out for a weekend, I'll post about it when I'm back in town. Hopefully I'll be full of inspiration...

What is in your Moleskine?

I love my Moleskine, but I'm always a bit hesitant to start writing or sketching in a brand new one. At the moment I use mine for my 'collection' of fruitlabels. The other examples I show here are just a few random downloads after surfing the web for a few minutes. You can see more examples here or here. At the Moleskine website you can see what artists did with a Moleskine notebook in the Detour project. Some of the books are amazing, for instance the one in the video by Tord Boontje.

Detour Exhibition - Tord Boontje from Moleskine ® on Vimeo.

So, what do you do with yours? Do you use it for writing, making notes, doodling or do you use it as a travel journal? I'm very curious to see what you do with it! If you feel like sharing your Moleskine send me a photo or a scan of your favorite page(s) and I'll put all the entries together in a blogpost. Needless to say, your name and website will be mentioned!

Send your e-mail to ellenturningpages [at] gmail [dot] com, or leave a comment below.

Japanese poetry and paintings

This beautiful book about japanse paintings andpoetry is actually quite small. It is very well printed and therefore a real gem. This was quite a bargain (about a euro). That really makes a visit to the thriftshop worth your while!

Peskimo!

Ahh, the lovely works of Peskimo. Happy, clever, colourful and inspiring.

'Peskimo is one half David and one half Jodie. Together they have been creating characters and creatures to join them in their daily lives in the city of Bristol in the UK. Together, Peskimo have been creating characters for toys, animations, advertising and clothing. They find inspiration from cartoons, vintage graphic design, chocolate and overhearing people in the post office queue. They hope one day to have their own ice cream van.' (But hey, who wouldn't, right?!)

Peskimo has a shop on Etsy, but you can also find their work for sale here.

My own boat

When I was growing up wanted everything my older brothers had. So when my grandfather made them a wooden boat to play with I wanted one too. A few weeks later he gave me this boat which he made especially for me. I was a little disappointed because this wasn't what I expected, it was far too beautiful! I was afraid to play with it and break it...

I'm not sure if I ever properly thanked him for making this piece of craftmanship for me.

Back home

We spent Easter weekend at my parents house in Zeeland. I took a few pictures I want to share, such as these. I took them last Saturday in one of my favorite thriftshops. The shop is called De Stoof and is located in Zaamslag in an old church (unfortunately the shop doesn't have a website). Quite a few items from my 'private collection' are bought in that shop. Last Saturday I bought a stack of vintage games, I'll post those another time, so come back for more!

Wooden boxes

Joep de beer and lots of birds

Cute book from my own childhood about Joep the Bear. I especially like the birds in the book!