Jitske's Creative Process

This is Jitske in her studio.

For this blog, I conducted an email interview with Jitske about her design methods. She shared these photos and explained her creative process to me.

“Last year I started my teacher training in Visual Arts and Design. Since then I challenge myself more to try out different techniques and media, without deciding right away whether the result is good or bad. I am learning to just keep busy making things. From there new ideas come. This is wonderful for someone like me, for I’d learned in my earlier student days to think ideas to death before I’d even get started. This new approach is liberating. Now I’m much more open and trust the creative process itself. Friday morning is my favorite morning of the week. That’s when I experiment with different printing techniques in the graphic arts studio. This makes me really happy! From this place of joy, as I work in my studio space, I began to experiment with collage. Collage allows me to use all of my useless scraps of prints in illustrations. Everything becomes useful. I’d love to become a teacher in this field so I can teach others the true fun of creating.”

“I prefer to let my creative process depend on accident and coincidence, which I then observe reflectively before deciding how to develop my pieces further. I notice that I block myself easily if I start with a very defined idea of what I want to do. I like to give myself lots of space to make ‘mistakes,’ which is why I now copy my prints so that I can play around freely. Using only a few composition sketches as a starting point, I begin to paint a background, for example, and then glue cut-out or torn-off parts of prints in layers on top of that. And if I want to add something figurative, I make drawaings on separate pieces of paper until I like the result; then I cut out the shapes so I can move them around in my composition. These days, I am mostly building from a background instead of drawing. I want to keep amusing myself with this method of working—until something else comes along that grabs my attention.”