I wish I could find an excuse for my incredibly long inactivity. But I cannot. I am lazy little b*tch. Without getting into much detail and pathetic apologies I will restart this blog with my favorite type of posts – an inspiration session. I hope this one makes it up for the huge delay.

To be honest, this interview started a month or two ago. The person I interview was on my list for “Inspiration Session interviews” for the longest time and I finally got to talking to her and arranging it. After taking a closer look into the fields of photography, design and illustration, and creative video production, I decided to go a bit more into the mind of a person with all of those passions developed. Monika is a former classmate of mine and an incredibly creative and passionate artist, designer, photographer, video editor, and more. I have been following all her projects for the past year or so and I always wondered how the hell she manages to operate so many projects at the same time and how she keeps herself inspired in so many different areas. So I decided to just ask her and she had a lot of interesting stuff to say so take a cup of coffee, tea, or whatever you enjoy drinking and see for yourself.

As usual, I would like to first give you some links so you can explore her work and follow her development and progress. She has so many projects it will be a mess, but bear with me, links will also be added throughout the interview for easy reference to what we are talking about. Monika‘s work is diverse, but it is all worth looking into and I am sure you will find inspiration regardless of what interests you most.

• To begin with, check out her Instagram, where you can find links to most of her projects.
• Her design and illustration project – Mo The Wallflower (and the Facebook page).
• One of her photography projects – Copenhagen Roofs
• Another interesting project – Ticket Journal
• Here you can find easy access to her video channels, her Flickr page, and Blog.
• Her YouTube channel
• And her website, just in case

I think we are safe to begin now. I hope you enjoy it!

An inspired and hard-working person in action

1. I always like to start my interviews with proper introduction. So, can you please introduce yourself?

Hello, there! I am Monika from a little town in Slovakia and I work under the name Mo the Wallflower. I am a dog lover, daydreamer, snow, and mountains-missing-explorer with a passion for a good cup of coffee and hygge, and beside all of that, I am designer and illustrator based in and around Copenhagen.

2. You are currently balancing several projects. Can you tell us a little bit about each one?

Help yourself with a cup of coffee or other lovely beverage, so you do not get bored!

My first project was CopenhagenRoofs – I started it the first days when I moved to Copenhagen in 2014, but it became an online project in 2016 when I learned how to use Instagram. This project is all about the Danish Copenhagen roofs from under (I wish I had a drone to do it from above), because the sky seems to be way closer to me, and hey, looking at the blue sky with all the colorful facades and lovely roofs is just a joy!

An example of the project CopenhagenRoofs

Then I created the account MoTheWallflower – this project was always in my head because it is all about illustrations and drawings and creating stuff. I got very inspired by Tina Sosna (check this out, you will not regret it!) with her simple and minimalistic illustrations and Photography. One day I would like to open my own online shop so I can sell some prints or stickers.
And as everybody else, I also have a Youtube channel where I upload vlogs and videos from my studio.

An example of one of Monika’s illustrations available on the account MoTheWallflower

TicketJournal is a project that also started in 2016 (fuu, looks like 2016 was a busy year) and I have this weird passion for saving every stub of ticket as a memory piece. As far as I remember I have always kept everything since I was 13 years old. Now I am trying to also put it online as a gallery of this tickets because since I am now studying design and illustration I admire each ticket design even more.

An example from the project TicketJournal

MoMasnicova is just a side profile and project of my amateur photography skills – I am trying to improve with every picture, but most importantly I am experimenting with digital and analog media. I love analog cameras and I owe more than 13 of them fully functioning, so also I am preparing some vlogs and videos that will also be available on my creative account MoTheWallflower and on Youtube.

A picture from Monika’s photography profile

Beside this projects I keep a small bunch of projects that I work eventually on as updates to my design portfolio – momasnicova.com and I also work on different small project just for fun, just to keep me inspired such as “shadow hunter” (available on her Instragram page) where I just take a photo of a shadow of a stranger in front of me.

3. Where does your endless inspiration come from? All those projects are so unique and different from each other, how do you manage to keep yourself inspired and where do you get the ideas from?

The ideas come and go. What I love to do is to always have a small notebook with me, where I write down everything that has ever inspired me or came up to my mind – from video challenges to complete line ideas- so I can tell you there is everything. But usually, the ideas come from just walking around the city or looking at other people work – because without them I would have never started anything.

Sometimes it is really hard to keep myself inspired, but once I start to work on my project, it is hard to stop. You have to be dedicated and the most importantly you have to have a goal, like when do you know the project is complete or what is the outcome of it.

When it comes to my inspiration – oh boy, let me tell you there is sooooo many interesting and creative people and if I can mention few of them – here you go:

TinaSosna(illustration and photography), StudioSilvana (illustration), I_stolethemoon (illustration, photography, fashion), @iogeer (photography), Loonative(photography), Dedelephotography (fashion photography), Okilde (travel photography), Frannerd (illustration), Leighellexson (drawings) and so on.

These are just a few people that came to my mind, if you want full recommendation you can contact me, I will always find someone inspiring.

4. If you had to choose only one thing to focus on for the rest of your life, which one would it be?

Illustration! It just makes me happy to see something coming together and alive. It is a very interesting format that you can do with so many different mediums – watercolors, markers, pencils, gouache – the list is endless.

But also my passion for analog cameras – I just love to experiment and the best things is you never know if you really captured something, and if the result will be good enough – it’s just amazing.

5. Do you have a plan for working on each project? How do you manage to balance between all of them and find time to work and update each one?

Well, to balance each of them is one thing, but to balance them with my life, school and work is another thing. But usually, I find myself a few days in a month where I try to update absolutely everything and plan for the next month. When it comes to my illustrations that just happens as I go – you can draw anytime – if you are in the school, bar or in the park.
So also because I do not have any income from my projects yet, I keep having multiple applications to help me plan and update my Instagram, such as Planoly, Later and Plann – I can recommend all of them.

And the most important thing is – keep it organized – each of the projects has to have its own folder in your computer or hard disk where you can find all of it – I am very organized about each project and keep everything by the date.

6. I would not be surprised if you have something else planned? What should we expect to see in the following months from you? Are you prioritizing any project, do you have any plans for something big?

As I mentioned above, I started Youtube channel (Mo the Wallflower), where I am planning to make loads of videos. Firstly, I will be making studio vlogs, and then I want to make some drawing challenges, and analog experiments, maybe some travel videos – just an ordinary youtube vlog.

Beside that I have a lot of small projects I want to try – some 30 day challenges to improve my drawing and design skills, I want to create my own font family,  to design some book covers, learn Danish, I would love to make some small performances and to shoot a short film.

7. Do you ever find yourself stuck in a creative block and what do you do if it happens?

It happens a lot and if this happens I usually try to relax and sleep, but if that is impossible I just do something – it is always better to do something small instead of nothing.  And if this does not work either – just get out of the house – you will be more inspired by the world around you then the four walls around.

I think the worst thing in this scenario would be looking at others people Instagram and compare yourself to the creative people out there.

8. Your ultimate goal? Where do you want to be in the future?

My ultimate goal would be London – the city that never sleeps – living in a small house with a dog and having a dream job as an illustrator. As I mentioned many times before – I think illustration is a way for me to go. However, the future is always far away, but what I have is a small visual moodboard with things I want in my life to happen – and I work towards that step by step each day.

9. A specific question – Copenhagen roofs – one of your very interesting projects, how did this happen, how did you get the idea, why roofs?

As I mentioned above this project started the very first week as I moved to Denmark in 2014 with my first trip around Copenhagen – I can tell that this was one of my first photos taken in Copenhagen. And I just could not believe how pretty the facades, roofs and blue sky is ( if you did not notice my favorite color is BLUE). And as I kept walking every day by the streets of Copenhagen, I just kept looking above and seeing all these cute little details that the buildings have – drawings, sculptures, little balconies. Sometimes I can not get enough and I literally walk like 4 hours around taking pictures of roofs – you can not imagine how many times some little teenage boy jumped in front of my camera and ruined my picture.

It is so hard to explain what this project is about because it is literally just about walking around and enjoying every bit of it.

10. Another specific one – your illustration style is really interesting and different – how did you develop it?

Everything is developed over time.  You get the pencil to your hand and it takes time until you can really handle it.

I started drawing when I was accepted to a Fine Art University in Brno, in the Czech Republic to study Performance, but my most favorite subjects were charcoal drawing and programming (that is also why I ended up here). You can see few of my charcoal drawings and sketches on MoTheWallflower. It was more of a body study, and I have to admit I loved every second of it –  you cannot imagine how much I improved within one year with a good teacher. So if there is something that holds you back, just practice more.

Also, a very big step for me was getting a Wacom drawing board that I can easily make digital illustrations and I love every step of it as I am also improving my skills with Photoshop.

I do not see my illustration style as very different from other artists, as I am still in the search of my very own.  But what you might notice at first is that I do not draw faces – well, that is something I have never been good at, but also not drawing a face will open more my illustration.

If there are more people struggling with this kind of question I would love to refer to one of my inspiration Frannerd – she made a very good video of explaining how she came to have her own illustration style:

11. A must-see movie and a must-read book?

I did not mention before that my name Mo the Wallflower comes from the name of a book “The Perks of being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbotsky – I recommend both the movie and the book, but I can not really tell you what it is about, because then it will lose its charm.

A second book that came to my life around the same time was “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D.Salinger.
Both of these books have one thing in common – the main character in the book is trying to find himself and it is up to you as a reader to decide it if was a success. I can relate to both of the books very closely as I see myself struggling in this path a little bit.

This interview was quite an inspiration for me personally (look at me being so inspired and delaying my blogs for months but let’s ignore that)  and I really hope it had the same effect on you as well. Monika is a person who is always active and never stops creating and this is the greatest inspiration you can get. I am looking forward to seeing what she comes up with next and I will be following all her projects with interest. And who knows, maybe we could do an art collab together sometime?

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more interviews and various content! Where do you find your inspiration?

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