The Importance of Taking Notes

Turn your intuition into a creative tool to give substance to your ideas and emotions with Fito Espinosa

Fito Espinosa (@fitoespinosa) is a painter, illustrator, and ceramicist. During a career that spans 20 years, he has managed to create a fantastical universe of characters, mixing his ingenious style with his own ideas and philosophical reflections.

He tries to connect to himself and the complex world of human emotion through his work. One of the tools that helps him generate ideas is simply taking notes.

Below, Fito shares his advice on how to turn apparently random and isolated ideas into projects with powerful emotion foundations.

Pay attention to the invisible

David Bohm and Carl Jung are two thinkers Fito turns to when reflecting on the intangible connections between people. The concept of the collective unconscious is the idea that we all, regardless of whether we know each other or not, share certain invisible ties that determine how we conduct ourselves.

Why are there similar constructions in different cultures when, at the time of their construction, they were not geographically connected like the cultures of today? Is there a shared space of ideas? For Fito, it is easy to explain this from the point of understanding inspiration.

Inspiration: inside or outside?

For Fito, the answer is on the inside. He explains this with an analogy of how a computer works with the internet: it has an antenna and, although the computer's memory is limited, the internet connection allows it to be in touch with all the information available outside its own system.

It is proven that we have thousands of thoughts a day. Most of them seem to be repetitive or based on prejudices, but if we are attentive, we can receive "clean" information from reality. Fito believes that the practice of keeping logs is extremely useful in recording the ideas that pass through your mind and stimulate your creative process.

Going with the flow

Look at this example of how Fito went from a random idea (imagining that the stars were not stars, but holes inside a vault), to an illustration in which he managed to externalize an unconscious idea that lived inside him. In drawing the vault, he realized that he had drawn the shape of a human head, in which he then decided to place the stars that, according to his own imagination, illuminate us from the inside.

If you want to learn more about translating your emotions into symbolic imagery, sign up to the Artistic Illustration: Draw from Your Imagination course, in which Fito will help you connect to your interior and explore your sensitivities and creative capacities.

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