Postcrossing Blog

Inge Löök is a Finnish illustrator and gardener who is perhaps best known for her “merry aunties” character postcards – an enduring favorite of postcrossers. She was previously featured on the blog over 10 years ago, and was kind enough to make time for an email interview with Clarisse (aka CStar9), for her series of conversations with illustrators and postcard makers. Enjoy!

Please tell us about your studio.

The place where I do my drawings is not very large; a table, a chair and the rest does not require much space. I prefer an enclosed small space where my thoughts stay together and do not wander away into other spaces. The house where I live is also small and the purpose of the house is solely to live in it. The nature outside is eternal and if I start to feel cramped I only need to open the door.

You take special care to create postcard sets of your art. Why postcards?

The old-fashioned way of sending letters and postcards is beautiful. You get to hold and touch the same paper the sender has touched. It is a gift and a thoughtfulness that requires planning in a completely different way than electronic messages.

For new ideas, what is the first step to getting an idea from your head to the page?

I do not use sketchbooks but I tend to use the back side of used photocopy sheets. Today I mainly draw postcards and if I get an idea I quickly note it down on any piece of paper with a few lines only so that I later remember how I envisage the theme for a new post card. An idea can emerge at any time, even in the middle of the night, and if so, in the morning I must swiftly note it to not forget it.

Please tell us a bit more about the origins of the Aunties characters in your art.

My closest neighbor lives around 30 meters from me in a house as small as mine. We think along the same lines and are in daily contact. She is actually one of the aunties in my illustrations, and I am the other one. In fact, we’ve played out most of what happens in my illustrations of the aunties. We’ve had wine in a tree, cakes under the table, and what we haven’t done, we wish we could do. This includes sitting high up in a clock tower with dangling legs. We are old now but know exactly how it felt when we were small and searched for messages in bottles.

Nature seems to be almost its own character in your work. We are treated to many detailed scenes that are infused with such attention and care – gardens, forests, fields, barns. How does a sense of place inform your art?

Nature is everything. I’m interested in the little and the small. I often sit with a magnifying glass and study the details of, for instance, flowers or a feather. As I see it, the big and the large then is space which offers fantasy experiences because we are unable to go there. I’ve got equipment for bird watching, and it is not only birds I look at, but the environment as a whole.

What is on the horizon for your art this year?

I’ve always had a hard time planning the future. The future has never really existed, but rather, it has merely appeared, which means that I have then had to face it as it appears.

To learn more Inge Löök and her work, visit her website or check out her Instagram.

If you’ve made it all the way here to the last bit, here’s a little bonus: Clarisse has 4 Inge Löök postcards to send to 4 postcrossers. To participate in this mini-giveaway, leave a comment below and let us know what adventures you imagine yourself on with your best friend, that would be worthy of being featured on a postcard! 😊 Check back this time next week for the winners!

Rachel Ignotofsky is a New York Times Best-Selling author and illustrator.

Rachel’s first book, Women in Science (2016), was published as a postcard box set in 2017. Her newest book-inspired postcard set, Women in Art, hit shelves in 2022. Thousands of these cards have since traveled between postcrossers’ mailboxes and inspired us to learn how our foremothers made a difference in the world.

This spring, I was able to catch up with Rachel via web-stream from the big red chair in her California studio.

Tell us about your studio. What might surprise us about the space?

I always end up taking over the living room because it’s the biggest room in the house. I have these two giant bay windows that go out to the patio. I open them up while I’m working and I can hear the birds. I have four screens going at once – a big iMac and a 6K display, and a drawing table that’s set up at an angle with a very large iPad. I go back and forth between typing and using a track-pad with my left hand and drawing with a Logitech pencil with my right. Ergonomic stuff that I’ve learned over the years, to protect those joints!

And next to all that is a laptop that’s playing the Great British Bake-off. So, there’s a lot going on.

You obviously do a lot of research for each subject you cover – and then you narrow the content down to simple elements. Tell us about that process.

What’s great about illustration and graphic design is that you can do a lot of the storytelling with just a simple drawing.

For me, I always start with the research. The research informs everything that I’m going to draw.

When I was doing research for the “Women in…” series, for some of the women, there was a lot of information available, especially for the Nobel prize winners. But for some of the women who really made significant contributions, sometimes their obituary was where I would have to start research-wise, and through that I could find some primary sources to learn more.

One of the women I featured, Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark: her alma mater Columbia University did an amazing audio archive of her talking about her life. It’s hours long and she talks about her entire career and her childhood, and what was it like prepping for the Brown v. Board of Education case, and what it was like having her husband be the face of the operation. It was such a wonderful resource.

So, again, I start with all of that – and that informs how I’m going to organize the information. I know graphically how I want it to look. And in the back of my head, I have these buckets I’m trying to fill with text: What’s going to be in the bucket of the main 500-word write-up? Then what are going to be the fun facts: things that are relatable and sticky in our minds? Some pieces I want to be more revealing: what was their character like, or their childhood? For the main illustration, I want to have little elements of their style and career that inform the reader about who they are before they read a single word.

I write about topics that people – for example, those who aren’t in the sciences – might feel insecure approaching. But when I use graphics to teach them before they start reading, it gives them the confidence to start.

You’ve spoken about your learning differences and how when you were young, comic books helped you approach information in your own way. Can you tell us more about that?

When I was a kid, I really struggled with reading, and it wasn’t until I started reading densely illustrated nonfiction books – books like DK readers – that I felt successful. There was something about being able to bounce around the page in a non-linear fashion that allowed me to keep my attention long enough to actually read everything on the page.

When learning to read, I remember holding my hand up to the line and struggling to follow my finger to read every word in order. But illustrated books that are more playful and less linear allow you to explore as you read. I didn’t feel like I was breaking any rules by reading the way that I naturally wanted to on the page, and that gave me the confidence – and the excitement and joy – to keep reading.

I’m now working on an elementary book series that’s all about backyard biology – introducing kids to the science that they’re going to be learning in elementary school, but in this really fun way. You could read it straight through, or you could bounce around the page and explore and learn different terms. Like, look at what these worms are doing in the soil. It’s all about freedom and joy when I’m creating my work.

It’s also about reaching as broad of an audience as possible. You reach neurotypical people, and I’ve also gotten a lot of people who have emailed me and been like, my kid has autism and really likes your books. I’m always trying to reach a 10-year-old and someone with a PhD at the same time.

I love how your illustrations of women scientists show that science is about more than just test tubes. There are flowers and there’s lava – these ladies are super dynamic!

There’s still a lack of diversity in representation in science. But since this book came out in 2016, there’s been a lot of work done to have more representation in media – more people of color, different genders in science. But many people still don’t think about the diversity of career paths in science.

That was actually a metric I used to decide who was going to be in the book. It wasn’t all going to be chemists. It wasn’t all going to be people who discovered new elements. That’s why there are so many people from the natural sciences – so many botanists or conservationists like Rachel Carson and Sylvia Earle and Jane Goodall. Some are amazed that I put psychologists in as well, but I’m like, yeah, because they’re scientists.

I’m doing a new book series for elementary school science – it’s called the What’s Inside series. What’s Inside a Caterpillar Cocoon comes out in September. The cover has my version of an emperor moth. The book follows the journey of moths and butterflies. Everyone always writes about the monarch. Yeah, the monarch’s cool, but it’s a big Order of insects, guys.

Kids naturally are curious. They naturally are drawn to the sciences. It’s the rest of the world that tells them – that’s not science, this is science. Kids want to go outside and play in the mud, and they have questions about the natural world. Those questions are the curiosity that creates a young scientist. So if we can create resources that say yes, this is science – this is more than just playing with flowers and being an outdoor kid. It actually is the beginning of a very rich journey. I’m hoping it sparks young kids to be more scientifically literate in the future, whether or not they choose that as a career path.

Can you tell us about your relationship to snail-mail? And to postcards specifically?

I only had one “real job” before working for myself, and it was 4 years working for Hallmark Greeting Cards. Cards, paper product, and snail mail is where I cut my teeth as a professional designer. It was my internship junior year, and then I got the job right out of college. I made an entire line of cards called Studio Ink that had, like, hot dogs with smiley faces that said, I’m a weenie, happy birthday!

At Hallmark, it was all about this idea of, how do you make something that’s so general that it applies to everyone, but it feels specific – like it only applies to you. That is something I’ve applied to my entire career. When I make a book, I want it to be able to relate to everyone but when people pick it up, I want them to think, wow, someone made the perfect book just for me.

I do send snail mail. I have a big stack of thank you cards. I used to send more snail mail when my grandparents were alive; I would send them cards constantly because they loved them so much. Now I am always mailing my friends and family packages. I’m big into package mailing. I also run a shop so literally I’m at the Post Office once a week. When the PO people know you and how you’re doing – that’s thumbs up.

We celebrated Mother’s Day last month in the USA — were there any striking themes around parenthood that emerged from the biographical stories you researched for the Women in… series?

I know my work is often read together with parents and their kids. I love to put in fun facts and moments that they can bond over. For example, when Primatologist Jane Goodall began her field research, she took her mom with her on her earliest trip to Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve. Vera Rubin is the astronomer who discovered the first real proof of the existence of dark matter, and her love of astronomy started when she built her first telescope with her dad! There are intergenerational moments of love and support throughout, which I think is very special.

Do you have a character or idea that has yet to make it to the page?

I have to be quiet about my ideas. I can tell you I’m about to work on a new book that’s all about dinosaurs and prehistoric life. And I just wrapped my last project – What’s Inside a Bird’s Nest? I got to draw the embryo development inside the egg. I like it when I get to draw gross things and make it pretty.

How do you know when a piece is finished?

When it’s due. You could work on something forever if you wanted to and really nitpick yourself. When it comes to being a professional artist, discipline is the name of the game. That’s what takes it out of the hobby space and into the professional space. A level of discipline that tells you to work when you don’t want to work, and also to put down the brush when you need to put down the brush.

To learn more about Rachel and her work, check out her website, where you’ll find free downloads as well as links to previous interviews she has given. You might also enjoy this live art demo with the New York Times! Her postcard sets can be found at Penguin Random House’s website and through a number of other popular retailers.

For those who’ve made it all the way to the end, we have a giveaway for you: Clarisse is planning to send 4 postcards from Rachel Ignotofsky’s sets to 4 randomly picked postcrossers! 🎉 To participate, leave a comment below sharing the remarkable contributions of a woman from your country — someone who you would like to see being featured on a postcard. Check back this time next week for the winners!