“For my second trip, I found it very difficult to come up with a destination. I wanted to find the perfect place to chill, be amazed by a new environment, try nice food, drink some beers and most importantly draw all day long. I started asking around and heard the name Ljubljana coming up more and more, so I checked it out online and it seemed to be everything I was looking for!

On my flight I could already see the natural beauty from my window, mountains everywhere, some even covered in snow, forests, blue lakes, fresh water, it looked very clean and healthy. When I arrived in the city I instantly fell in love with the candy-colored houses and buildings. It felt like I was in the town of Studio Ghibli's "Howl's moving castle”. On Sunday morning I visited the flea market, which was a great spot to find so many beautiful vintage toys. The best thing from my trip was definitively meeting Helena Stamulak, a resident, who showed me around for two days. She was the best and showed me all the ins and outs of this lovely city.

Drawing from my adventures and memories, I ended up with 30 pages of drawings full of new characters and other items. All of these characters were worked out on the computer and I ended up with one big design of over 100 items. It has always been my dream to see my work in sculptural form, so over the next months, I was very closely involved with the production process. It took a lot of machines, tests and figuring out how to make sure all of the design worked. The final steps involved screen printing directly on the wood, cutting out and sanding all of the characters, now after dreaming about this for four years, my sculpture sets are finally here!”

Travel diary

Saturday, March 24, 2018

And we’re off! So excited about going on this Jaunt to Ljubljana! My intentions for the trip are, explore and be inspired but also sit down at nice pubs, drink beer and draw as much as possible. So I already started doing this at 11am at schiphol airport. After all it is a holiday so why not. The flight was awesome, very clear sky and lots of beautiful sceneries. I especially loved the last part, alps and Slovenia. The guy next to me in the plane told me he was a climber and climbed lots of mountains, Including Mont Blanc… but I didn’t believe him.

Once I arrived in Ljubljana I went for a quick walk (read, going to the beer shop) and my first impression of the city was that it is so colourful, not too big but lovely and lots to do. I have met up with local illustrator and toy designer Helena Stamulak in the evening and she showed me around town and we had a couple of drinks. Good first day!

Monday, March 26, 2018

On Friday Helena took me to the castle on top of the hill in the middle of the city. We went to see the museum of puppetry inside the castle which was beautifully made, super funny and adorable! The view from the castletower was amazing and later when we went down we had a Argentinian steak for dinner at the open kitchen food festival. To be honest, I was still a bit shakey… thought this was a hangover from the evening before but it later turned out that I had some kind of flu 🤮

Sick or not, i had to attend the Air Max day party at local sneakersop One Way because they also had a raffle for the latest Sean Wotherspoon Nike air max, which as all you fellow sneaker heads probably know is the most anticipated release of the year. 200 people showed up and entered the raffle, needless to say, I was not lucky but did enjoy the awsome event and party.

Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Ok still sick today but let’s get some fresh air! Walked around the city to make sure I visited everything on my list. Also went to see the Metelkova area that I heard a lot about. But to be honest, this really isn’t my style. Just like Christiana in Copenhagen, it is just a crusty place created by a bunch of acid heads haha. So many fluor colours, garbage and bad graffiti. I can understand that the average Joe thinks this is funny and edgy but to me as a creative it is just bullshit, sorry!

I did like the big Tivoli Park though! This is another hill situated on the east side of the city, part park, part forrest, just like I experienced on my first jaunt to Helsinki back in the days. I just climbed the hill, found a nice spot and was drawing for a while. Which was really nice, and I now have a bunch of squirrels and a drooling Labrador that I can call my friends.