Work diary: The Making of the Atin Journal Set

My always messy worktable. Tubes of paint overcrowding a toolbox, boxes and boxes of containers (attempts to organize the space), smatterings of paint and tattoo stencils on the desk.

Atin is a Filipino word that means ‘ours’. Akin, on the other hand, means ‘mine’.

I was contacted by the lovely people over at Looking for Juan to collaborate on a set of journals and writer/counselor/development worker Meg Yarcia. They asked me to paint about oneness with your community; seeing the others in ourselves. This set is made of one group journal (Atin) and individual journals (Akin). These are designed for friends and loved ones who want to share stories, reflect, and carry life together.

They asked me to come up with artwork for the journal’s cover, the main chapter pages, and some elements for activities in the last pages. They also gave me keywords per quarter, what the focus of each chapter would be on.

I then sent them rough, and digitally-illustrated sketches (around 2 versions for each chapter) of what I envisioned from the content plan they provided. After internal deliberations—and they were pretty chill clients to work with, hallelujah—they chose which options resonated with them the best. I then proceeded to paint this all on paper with gouache and watercolors, my favorite mediums of all time.

I always listen to music that I think suits the mood of the project I’m doing, and I think in the future, it will be super fun to include that in these work posts. This project was an outlier in terms of music alignment, though. Can you believe I was almost exclusively listening to Turnstile while I was painting these?

I wanted to come up with something that evoked ‘Kapwa’—the Filipino way of recognizing oneself in the other, and in turn, the other recognizing an identity shared with you. It is all about the community, the family, the others in this side of the world. It always has been. I also wanted to express this perhaps more whimsically. As I painted I came upon this: the feeling of expansiveness and abundance: a sense of spaciousness amidst the company of others—space to grow and be, so that one can be so full that it is inevitable to share.