Taste of freedom
It came to me during one of the lockdowns, like with so many people. The sudden realisation that there might be another way, outside the normal office hours, away from computer screens, doing something I love.
At the time I was working from home for an architecture office, obeying the office hours, ready for the phone to ring, but enjoying the freedom of not being in a crowded office. Getting a feeling of how it might be to work for yourself. I could quickly go shopping, drop something off at the post office or boil potatoes already in the afternoon. That was my first taste of something I never experienced before, it seemed so normal, so achievable, this is what I wanted.
Where to start
The first step on my way to CEO was figuring out what to do. How do you earn money as a boss? At this point, I was an employee and worked more or less the same job for close to 20 years. I never really questioned my choices, even though I never really loved going to work. But who does? So far, being employed paid for my travels, that was all that mattered up to now. Also, at that time, my wife just started a 3 years apprenticeship and earned close to nothing, so questioning one’s only means of getting paid seemed not so smart. But the seed was planted.
I remembered that for a moment I quite liked going to work. That was when I was in the apprenticeship, I learned technical drawing for 4 years. Everything was drawn by hand then, with pencil and ink. That’s what brought me to this industry in the first place, it was the drawing, not the building of houses! Of course! Drawing! I remembered being quite good at it and enjoying it. Nowadays I draw on the computer for 8.5 hours every day (plus more screen time in the evenings, at home). It’s not all bad of course, there’s a lot to love about all the things possible on a machine. But drawing for me always meant drawing by hand. Feeling the pen gliding on the paper, the different pens on different papers. Sketching, shading, writing. I had to reconnect to this.
So I started drawing again in the evenings. I knew from learning guitar that it’s important to practice regularly, even if it's just 2 minutes, even if it’s just one line, still better than nothing. I set up a random generator on my phone that gave me a different animal prompt every time and I just drew it, sometimes it was a 2-minute job, and on others I spent 2 hours on it. Over the months I saw progress, slowly but there was an improvement.
Ink on the wall
The idea for my first poster and therefore the idea for an online shop just sort of appeared, I’ve been thinking about palm trees for a few days already (probably because I missed travelling) and then I remembered a shirt I once owned. Sadly it disappeared in one of the many laundry runs when I travelled in the Philippines. It had a black and white photo of a single tall palm tree on it. This image stuck somehow and I thought it might look great to have a whole collection of palms next to each other. I was ready to give it a shot.
It took many attempts to get one decent palm tree and ages to have a bunch ready to print. I hadn't found ’my style‘ yet and also didn’t own any programs to design and publish the posters. So I had to first learn about software, about printers and inks and colour profiles and the like. Eventually, I had something worth printing and when it arrived back home, in a cardboard tube I was so happy! To see this random idea printed on nice, heavy paper, this felt right! Even better, when I showed it to family and friends they seemed positively surprised. My sister bought one on the spot. I knew family and friends are not real-life judges, but you can get a feeling any way if it’s somehow decent or not.
So I went crazy with palm trees.